Erin McKean

“All words have life cycles.”

“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.”

“We've been using 'rejuvenate,' meaning to restore youth, to make young again, as a verb for at least 200 years.”

“Words are so lovable. How could you not love words?”

“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.”

“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.”

“Language is a nice way to remember things.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Experiences is just paying attention as time passes.”

“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!'”

“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.”

“A love letter is to be savored; a love email... is to be forwarded to all your friends, and probably laughed at.”

“It's difficult to choose a Word of the Year in the year that you're in. It's one of those things that hindsight makes more apparent. It's like looking at pictures from 10 years ago, and you notice the flannel and the ripped jeans. At the time, it didn't look to you like a real fashion trend.”

“Singing when no one else is around is always good. I especially like belters. Good, loud singing is probably better medicine than half the stuff they sell in pill bottles, and it's cheaper, too. I also think people should never turn down an opportunity to hold a baby. There's something about the feel of a new baby in your arms that just fixes you.”

“'Aging' has been bad ever since we figured out it led to dying.”