Urban Dictionary name definitions the latest Facebook craze

The site made its name on user-submitted scatological definitions, and a Facebook status trend is capitalizing on it.

Move over, celebrity doppelganger week.

Facebook's cool kids are ditching "CDW" and the siblings profile pics for something even more out-there: Urban Dictionary-sourced status updates.

How's it work? (Again, our standard "if we have to explain this to you, it's no longer cool" disclaimer applies.)

But before we explain, a warning lest anyone decide to try this: The user-submitted definitions on Urban Dictionary are often intentionally revolting passages that appeal to the lowest forms of scatalogical humor. We endorse neither the site nor the activity we're about to describe. In fact, if you're lost for something to do on Facebook, why not read about teens' fickle Facebook habits and how blogs and Twitter are falling out of favor? Or head over to our stories on Obama's nuclear policy or the bubbling Toyota recall debacle and post them to your wall. News not your thing? Start up Farmville – it'd really be more productive.

All of that said, curious Facebookers can head over to urbandictionary.com and enter their first name in the look-up field, and then paste the definition returned as their status. That's it.

What's the point? One would assume the name definitions returned by Urban Dictionary claim to say something about the person posting them as their status. But in actuality, the act is akin to opening a fortune cookie and expecting the riddle inside to provide personalized, life-altering advice.

Not to come off as a curmudgeon, but where celebrity doppelganger week (or month – some people are still just discovering it) lent a bit of fun to people's normal social networking identities, this Urban Dictionary thing just smacks of worthlessness. Aside from the deplorable, appalling content of many of the entries, the whole act quacks a bit like a crowd-sourced amateur horoscope.

Facebook trends can be fun, silly, even useful – see the campaign to raise awareness about privacy on the site. But this? This just needs to go away.

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