Erin McKean

“Words take on many different meanings.”

“Lexicographers are language reporters.”

“You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘female’.”

“Part of the joy and pleasure of English is its boundless creativity: I can describe a new machine as bicyclish, I can say that I'm vitamining myself to stave off a cold, I can complain that someone is the smilingest person I've ever seen, and I can decide, out of the blue, that 'fetch' is now the word I want to use to mean 'cool.'”

“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.”

“By the time the traditionally male lexicographers become interested in looking at fashion words, their origins are lost in the mists of time.”

“If words are doing their job, then their novelty will not be the most noticeable thing about them.”

“If anything is guaranteed to annoy a lexicographer, it is the journalistic habit of starting a story with a dictionary 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.”

“You can limit the number of invitations to an in-person fashion show, but you can't police the Internet.”

“The use of food metaphors is really well established English... Somebody is a peach, a hot tamale.”

“All language is a popularity contest.”

“There are hundreds of thousands of words that aren't in any print dictionary today... because there's no space for all of them.”

“Ideally my goal is, before I die, to have some information about every word that's ever been used in print.”

“What I'm interested in is how people are reading and writing English.”

“Uniforms are intended to make the wearer look as strong as possible. Soldiers could fight in leotards, but that's never going to happen because leotards aren't intimidating.”

“Twitter is like overhearing people's conversations, which is exactly what dictionary editors have been wishing we could do for years.”

“People say jargon is a bad thing, but it's really a shortcut vocabulary professionals use to understand one another.”

“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.”

“There are very few good ways to get publicity for a dictionary.”