Where Did Rainbow Kiss Slang Urban Dictionary Originate From?

I have found most of the information about the origin of the term online, rummaging through old forum posts, and other websites, including archives of websites long gone. The origin of this term, and the majority of other terms of this nature, can be found in the online communities of the early Internet, including message boards, forums for fetishists and sexual deviants, and newsgroups. The language of these communities is a fascinating, dirty, and above all, peculiar mess of slang terms, and dirty words, much of which is unpleasant to read, and even more unpleasant to look at.

Urban Dictionary is the archivist and, as a platform, it serves as a kind of megaphone to the slang in use online. However, the platform allows anybody to add definitions to words, which means that the words and their meanings are typically captured shortly after the term has started to spread through online subcultures. It is then picked up by mainstream listicles, by ‘shock’ websites, and by people posting about online in social networks. So the platform serves as a kind of mirror to underground vocabulary and as a broadcast to a wider online audience.

As for pinpointing when this term was ‘first used’, it is difficult to track as it appears to have roots within subcultures of British and American Internet users, and thus the earliest threads that arguably ‘started’ the word are typically deleted posts, now-defunct anonymous forums and private groups. However, today the term is most often referenced pejoratively (i.e. used in a snide or derogatory manner), and as such I believe this term is an odd but fascinating example of internet culture as it highlights some of the most unusual aspects of human behavior and how their terms and ensuing attitudes are collectively stored, with little to no editorial interference.

For another take at this word, this phrase is of course some pretty underground online slang that would have initially been documented on crowd-sourced resources like Urban Dictionary (where users add in all sorts of lewd and crude terms as they come across them online). Once a word has hit a resource like this, it gets propagated through social media, via listicles that are designed to shock, as well as through online forums and comment threads.

The insight into the online evolution of language is wonderful. How the internet is a pressure cooker for behavior and language online – concentrating things until they burst out into the mainstream with very little filtering along the way. It’s sometimes quite amusing, sometimes quite gross, but always interesting to see. I find that this particular example is more of an illustration of the online evolution of vernacular language than anything else of note, but it’s also made me rather morbidly curious to see just how language will continue to surprise us online.

Oh great. I had almost (hopefully) forgotten about this term, which as I recall, was used to ‘reveal’ to unsuspecting forum-goers just how disgusting music fans were, about 15 years ago or so on a music forum’s offtopic board. As I recall, the term originated in early days of imageboarding, alongside other ‘shock’ terms. The term itself is a play on two fairly innocent words, which when conjoined in just the right way, form a rather loathsome and sickening concept. It’s a classic term of the ‘troll’ lexicon – something which is intentionally shocking and which is designed to test boundaries and see how others react. The term has found a sort of home in the typologically varied pages of Urban Dictionary, where most of the definitions for the term consist of repetitions of the joke in question, rather than any kind of in-depth exploration or study. And its origin story is quite possibly the origin story of the anonymous, ‘ boundary-pushing’ type of online behavior which seeks to shock, alienate and often simply annoy the uninitiated.