I feel like this article commits a serious oversight by failing to reference http://www.urbandictionary.com/ http://www.urbandictionary.com/ and the problem it

I feel like this article commits a serious oversight by failing to reference http://www.urbandictionary.com/ http://www.urbandictionary.com/ and the problem it raises for this enterprise: How does one determine if a word is actually used in communication or if it's existence is is merely a result of trolling. To take one example, I seriously doubt that the entry "wolfbagging" refers to a genuine sexual activity that people engage in, but that does not mean it is not used in some metaphorical or referential sense. After all, "rainbow parties" were never a phenomenon in the 90s outside the minds of the media and jumpy parents, but that is probably a phrase that has entered common knowledge in the U.S. One cannot use ridiculousness or physical possibility as a test. One has to look at a sufficiently a massive corpus of text to observe the word being used in the wild. The reddit corpus might be sufficient, but even then, that will only let you decide that the word exists with a certain subculture.