Urban Dictionary Word Of The Day
Every weekday for the past three months I’ve been creating and posting short videos like this one.
You might have seen them on my Instagram, Twitter or TikTok. It looks a bit different than the first one I posted back on April Fools Day.
While that was the first video I posted, it wasn’t the first one I created. I wanted to start a new daily micro-series back in January and I’ve always loved language so I thought a word of the day series might be a good format to try for a few reasons.
There are 170,000 common words in the English language, so I’d never lack inspiration.
As the son of a writer and narrator, I’ve been endowed with a voluminous vocabulary and an ability to enunciate and pronounce the English language with only the slightest hint of a Canadian accent which might prove endearing to international audiences seeking someone to assist their terminological training.
While I’ve never been a teacher, days after I turned 18 I spent a month living in Beijing voicing English language educational videos and in the twenty years since I’ve narrated countless E-learning courses. “That’s incorrect. Please try again.”
So, with that in mind, I picked out some words for the first month, wrote the scripts for the first five and recorded them. I even edited the first one – here’s how it turned out.
I didn’t end up posting it because I didn’t think it was that good. Sure the picture and sound quality are better than most of what you get on social media from independent individual creators, but for an educational series, it wasn’t particularly insightful. It wasn’t funny enough to be considered a comedy series… so what was it? The only thing I knew for sure was that it wasn’t good enough for release. At least, not yet.
When I was nine or ten, I started listening to George Carlin cassette tapes while going to sleep. If you’re familiar with his comedy you might be shocked to think of a kid listening to his famous bit about the seven dirty words. And if you’re unfamiliar with his comedy, while yes, he was sometimes “vulgar” he absolutely loved to investigate and critique every aspect of our evolving language.
So perhaps it’s no surprise that I’d eventually find my way to marry my word of the day idea, with the Urban Dictionary.
This way I can celebrate and investigate the evolution of our language, while hopefully finding some humour in the juxtaposition of a friendly Mr. Rogers type character and delivery with the subject matter of street and internet slang.
I love that the Urban Dictionary is contributed to by English-speaking people all over the world. Sure, many terms listed in the lexicon are truly tasteless and toxic. It includes lots of hate speech and terms designed to denigrate, subjugate and divide people. But, there’s also a lot of great, creative, hilarious stuff that can also be strangely unifying.
While I’ll happily accept suggestions for words to cover, so far I’ve tried to only select terms from the official Urban Dictionary Instagram account. I’ll avoid ones that target specific individuals, marginalized groups or are so offensive or raunchy I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying them in front of my friends and family – but maybe as the series develops those rules will change and I’ll always make exceptions to poke fun at authority figures.
Otherwise, I’ll take the provided definition and perhaps cut words out or make reasonable substitutions for brevity, but I don’t significantly alter the provided meaning or example sentence, which I do my best to read verbatim.
My videos were originally just a simple one-take setup, so aside from adding in the subtitles, I figured it wouldn’t be too much work to produce them. I thought I could write, shoot and edit a week’s worth of videos in an afternoon.
I’ve been at it for nearly three months now and I can tell you, it was never just that easy. Also, now that I’ve updated the format, with layered cut-aways include compositing and visual effects, it’s become way more work than I ever imagined.
I’m going to try to continue to make them because I’m enjoying the creative challenge. In less than three months I’ve hit 1000 followers on TikTok without paying for views, followers or likes and I don’t have a small waist, pretty face and a big bank, so I think there’s an audience out there for the series, or at least for me.
I’m hoping to create additional series so eventually, I can release a video in a different format every day. I already have some ideas too, and a bit of writing done, but it’s been an ongoing challenge to find the time to do the pre-production work while also spending so much of the past three months doing significant renovations on my backyard all while producing video content to go along with it.
But all that stuff should all be done soon, and in the meantime, I’ll try my best to keep producing Urban Dictionary Word Of The Day and I’ll keep Twitch streaming Monday and Wednesday nights.
I’ll end this update with a big thank you to everyone who has supported the series and my creative efforts so far.
THANK YOU!!
OH and P.S I submitted “Spooky Feed” to the Urban Dictionary, it’s a term I’d love to see catch on and gain acceptance in traditional dictionaries eventually – if you’ve watched and enjoyed this video, please go give it an upvote.