Urban Dictionary – an online repository of contemporary slang – is a site I like to imagine Jeremy Paxman stumbling across late at night, belief truly beggared, abominating today's cretinous youth as he reads entries on niche drug terminology and unspeakable sexual acts. Except it's really not cretinous. Sometimes, as the New York Daily News recently reminded us, it is in fact truly delightful.

The paper recently drew attention to the many entries for author names and pronounced them "the history of literature as seen by millions of 17-year-olds today". There's a touch of the fogeyish snark to that declaration but lots of the examples are inspired: the canon redux. The entry for "Kerouac", for example, is a tiny mote of poetry in itself: "to wander aimlessly for the giddy thrill".

They depend on at least some familiarity with the writer and their oeuvre, so if they really are being written by 17-year-olds it's nothing but heartening: the youth of today is not only literate but has a sense of humour too. The thought, for example, of teenagers choosing to incorporate the greatest surviving work of early Mesopotamian literature into their vernacular ("Gilgamesh: Something or someone epic beyond words, such as Gilgamesh himself. Something or someone worthy of having an epic written about them/it. Ex: Those shoes are just gilgamesh") makes me wildly happy. That, to me, seems the very opposite of reductive.

Like Wikipedia, anyone can contribute entries, which means they can range from the surely idiolectic to the recognisably common. What's delightful is knowing that a term coined by someone on a whim or born from an in-joke has the potential to become part of the lexicon – language is just consensus, after all. With that in mind, I'll be pushing "going Foer". It means to turn vegetarian after reading Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals, and judging by personal and anecdotal evidenc it's a phenomenon that absolutely demands its own term.

This being Urban Dictionary, there are of course lots of naughtier ones, including the most recherche slang for cocaine I've ever heard in the form of "Walt Whitman" – he wrote long lines, see? And then there's the felicitous "Hemingway", a verb meaning to write an essay under the influence of alcohol. I think he would have been proud of that one. JK Rowling might be less happy about hers: some belletrist has proposed the children's author's name as a marvellously inappropriate if semantically sly term for "being under the effects of cannabis (jay) and ketamine (kay): JK Rowling. Ex: Man, I'm rowling so hard right now."

I don't wish to Tolstoy on ("to make significantly longer than necessary to convey the relevant message") but I can't believe no one's yet coined "Franzen". Surely "to fulminate about the deleterious effects of social media", no? And perhaps there's a case for "Dyer" too, meaning "to digress amusingly a la Geoff"?

Suggestions welcome below …