Abraham’s Hometown Confused By Teen Use Of ‘Ur Dumb’

They wonder what the early-twenty-first-century youth population has against them.

Ur, September 18 – Residents of this Mesopotamian city-state admitted consternation today over the common use of their location’s name in online communication, most commonly when teens and other young users attach it to insults such as “ur dum” and “i did ur mom.”

Leaders and commoners in Ur have watched for years as the Sumerian-dominated town on the lower Euphrates is repeatedly invoked in chats, comments, and other forms of typed communication, often hundreds of millions of times per day. Most of the uses of “ur” in these contexts causes mere confusion in the city-dwellers’ minds, while a sizable minority they find patently offensive, and wonder what the early-twenty-first-century youth population has against them.

“I get that adolescents often resort to insult-based humor, or just insults in general, as a way of establishing a social position,” said Sargon the Great, an Akkadian who dominated Ur between the 24th and 22nd centuries BCE. “But I doubt most of them have even heard of Ur. I’m as egomaniacal as the next Mesopotamian god-king, but I don’t delude myself into thinking I play a central role in the rhetoric of teens and preteens four thousand years from now.”

Terah ben Nahor, an icon salesman and father of three, confessed how disturbed he and his neighbors feel at the insults. “It doesn’t stop,” he complained. “If there was something we ever did to incur the wrath of these legions of people, I’d hope someone would tell us, and we’d try to set it right, or at least express the proper contrition and try to avoid recurrences. No such luck – we just have to sit here and take it as these whippersnappers sling ‘ur an idiot’ and ‘who does ur hair? stevie wonder?’ at one another, with no regard for the effect it has on us.”

“Maybe we need a safe space,” suggested his son Haran. “I hear that’s a concept with which those users are familiar. A trigger warning? Something?” His brothers, father, and two daughters responded with a blank look.

If the flood of insulting messages does not stop, Ur leaders are considering a massive infrastructure project to disrupt them. “We’re going to have to build a massive tower so we can jam their signals,” argued Nimrod, an ambitious leader with a vaunted reputation as a hunter. “Everything is going to have to give way before this tower. It’ll be the defining feature of our civilization.”

“Even if we don’t succeed in the project’s stated goals, I guarantee by the time we’re halfway through no one will be complaining about chats and texts,” he vowed.