For years, Urban Dictionary has been thought of as nothing more than a fun, if not crude, website frequented by middle schoolers looking for colorful new ways to insult their friends or refer to NSFW topics. A note for the Urban Dictionary uninitiated: “NSFW” is an acronym for “not safe for work.” It refers to inappropriate content you would never want your boss or co-workers to catch you looking at on your work computer.
But it is 2022. We are living in a time when the ridiculous has become credible. Where the joke is reality. Internet culture is mainstream culture. And in these modern, changing times, Urban Dictionary has been pulled out of middle school and dropped into the American Court system. Judges across the nation are turning to Urban Dictionary for the definitions of slang terms that appear in litigation.
“Wack,” “dominatrix” and “big dawg” are all words and phrases American judges have turned to Urban Dictionary to define. While Americans between the ages of 12 and 38 (Generation Z and Millennials) would likely understand what these words mean without more context, most judges are Baby Boomers who are not familiar with the current slang. While the nation’s median age is 38.2, the median age of our judges is nearly twice that at 67.8.
The trend in courthouses to turn to unorthodox corners of the internet for definitions makes sense in more ways than one.
First, it is the age of the internet. We are in the midst of an information revolution. It has never been easier to find the answer to practically any question. There is no reason to remain ignorant, when the internet has the answers for free (if you don’t count the value of our consumer profiles and time spent passively consuming ads). Googling the meaning of a word and clicking on the link to its definition is something nearly all of us do when we come across a word we don’t understand. Why should judges be exempt from that kind of convenience? Judges are, after all, people too.
Second, Urban Dictionary can be useful when the objective meaning of a word is crucial to deciding the central issue a case. Urban Dictionary is a crowd driven platform. Users post definitions to various words and phrases, and other users vote on the meaning that they believe best encapsulates the word. The most popular definitions to the most popular words have tens of thousands of upvotes. It would be nearly impossible for courts to crowd source that volume of information on their own. It is also important to remember that a word only has meaning when society, as a collective, decides what it means. Urban Dictionary can be an excellent way to determine what the majority of society has decided a particular word that is not defined by traditional dictionaries means.
For example, in Brown-Baumbach v. B&B Auto., Inc. a female plaintiff sued for sexual harassment based on a hostile work environment, gender discrimination, and retaliation. Crucial to the court’s decision to deny the defendant’s motion for summary judgment was determining whether a comment that the plaintiff had “creamed in her pants” was gender based or not. The court found the Urban Dictionary definition of the phrase was “[t]o have a spontaneous orgasm upon viewing something of exceptional awesomeness.” Based on that definition, the court determined the comment was both objectively sexual in nature and based on the plaintiff’s sex.
Urban Dictionary is not the only website judges have turned to for answers. In a 2010 issue of the St. John’s Law Review, authors Jason Miller and Hannah Murray wrote that since 2004, “courts throughout the country have looked to Wikipedia for geographic information, to establish which days are ‘business days,’ to explain the meaning of common phrases, to define such technical terms as ‘radiculopathy,’ to interpret slang such as ‘booty music,’ and for a range of other purposes.”
Some may be shocked to hear that. Wikipedia is still widely seen in academic communities as an unreliable source. Wikipedia itself warns its users that it is not a reliable source.
Wikipedia works in a similar way to Urban Dictionary. Anyone can upload an informational article to the site, and anyone can edit the article once it is posted. Despite its almost too democratic design, Wikipedia can be incredibly useful when the wisdom of the masses itself is what is significant.
Nevertheless, there are many critics who believe websites like Urban Dictionary and Wikipedia have no place in the court system. Labor attorney and senior editor of The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, Tom Dalzell, said in a New York Times article that Urban Dictionary has no place in the courts and called it “a lazy person’s resource.”
Courts should absolutely be careful about how they use these resources. While the wisdom of the masses is important, posts on sites like Urban Dictionary and Wikipedia can be edited with a few keystrokes by anyone on the internet.
Miller and Murray wrote about a federal magistrate judge in Connecticut who used Wikipedia to define, among other things, the symptoms of “Hepatitis C, alanine transaminase, the symptoms of fibromyalgia, [and] fentanyl”. Miller and Murray warned against this kind usage, writing that while “[t]hese definitions may be entirely accurate . . . [because of] the risk of inaccuracy for such technical terms—and a public awareness of this risk—we suggest it is inappropriate to rely on Wikipedia in these cases.”