Another reason the ocean must be destroyed

It’s possible that working in a library awakened the latent word nerd in me; the Dewey decimal system seems to resonate with a deep respect for etymology and classification that exists in my soul. Not to say that I’m the sort of person who gets flustered by disorder, on the contrary I think a healthy dose of anarchy nicely invigorates any calmly ordered system. I think what I enjoy is the arbirtrary nature of the meanings of things.
So I was quite pleased to stumble across www.urbandictionary.com. It’s an online dictionary that operates a bit like Wikipedia: users can submit words and definitions and also rate other peoples words and definitions. There are many online dictionaries which document ephemeral, new or slang language (Double Tongued Dictionary at http://www.doubletongued.org , also http://wordlust.blogspot.com) but urban dictionary is the first one I’ve seen which is user-created. This means, of course, that a large proportion of the content has some degree of obscenity, and some of it is just silly, but there is the occasional gem. I like creative redefinitions such as the entry for ‘Hurricane’:
A temporary alliance formed between the ocean and the sky with the goal of killing people. The ocean's ability to attack the land is limited, so it lends the sky some of its water and energy so it can assault people farther inland then it normally could.
Hurricanes are far more powerful then the storms the sky creates on its own. They are just another reason the ocean must be destroyed.
Without quite going so far as to say that a linguistic revolution is poised to sweep the world, I think the open collaborative definition, or redefinition, of words is a really interesting exploitation of online public space. Language has always evolved fluidly, but the internet provides an excellent forum for the active collaborative reconstruction of a system of classification which has always been largely determined by the information elite in universities, museums and libraries.
This train of thought reminds me of an exhibition I saw about Georges Bataille (1897-1962), a French writer, thinker, friend-of-artists and all round clever guy. Bataille produced a magazine called Documents in which he included regular entries of what he called a ‘critical dictionary’ where he re-defined words in an attempt to subvert language as a system of meaning (see http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1768599,00.html for a good overview of the aims and achievements of Documents).
To redefine the verbal topography of your world is to determine the way it is described, represented and understood, and to question the assumptions that are inherent in any system of meaning.