Words matter. These are the best Erin McKean Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Almost any word can be drafted to serve as a verb, even words we think of as eternal and unchanging, stuck in their more traditional roles.
‘Aging’ has been bad ever since we figured out it led to dying.
Objections to verbification in English tend to be motivated by personal taste, not clarity. Verbed words are usually easily understood. When a word like ‘friend’ is declared not a verb, the problem isn’t that it’s confusing; it’s that the protester finds it deeply annoying.
I think we would all like to believe that every new event demands a new word. But we’re environmentally conscious with our words. We recycle words we’ve got.
Most of the words you know and love and use every day are not words you learned by looking them up in a dictionary and reading a definition.
Writers who hedge their use of unfamiliar, infrequent, or informal words with ‘I know that’s not a real word,’ hoping to distance themselves from criticism, run the risk of creating doubt where perhaps none would have naturally arisen.
Ideally my goal is, before I die, to have some information about every word that’s ever been used in print.
By the time the traditionally male lexicographers become interested in looking at fashion words, their origins are lost in the mists of time.
Twitter has already birthed an entire ecosystem of other sites that extend its power or interact with it. But Twitter isn’t just a platform for technological innovation: It’s showing signs as an engine of creativity for the language, too.
If you say ‘anti-aging,’ how anti would it have to be, really? My guess is not much. Any amount of sunscreen could be considered anti-aging.
All words have life cycles.
Words are so lovable. How could you not love words?
There are hundreds of thousands of words that aren’t in any print dictionary today… because there’s no space for all of them.
Words take on many different meanings.
If you’re talking about how you promoted synergy in an organization, that could mean you just got everybody together for donuts twice a week.
If words are doing their job, then their novelty will not be the most noticeable thing about them.
We think people go to a dictionary to find out what a word means. Most people go to the dictionary because they don’t want to look stupid.
For me, conferences are like little mental vacations: a chance to go visit an interesting place for a couple of days, and come back rested and refreshed with new ideas and perspectives.
Most consumers don’t have a good metric for deciding on whether the dictionary they want to use is a good one… so they flip the book over, then go to the back, and it says, ‘Over 250,000 entries.’ And they go, ‘Great, this dictionary must be awesome!’
Lexicographers are language reporters.
