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. Erin McKean Read Quote
If anything is guaranteed to annoy a lexicographer, it is the journalistic habit of starting a story with a dictionary definition. Erin McKean Read Quote
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. Erin McKean Read Quote
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!’ Erin McKean Read Quote
There are hundreds of thousands of words that aren’t in any print dictionary today… because there’s no space for all of them. Erin McKean Read Quote
Ideally my goal is, before I die, to have some information about every word that’s ever been used in print. Erin McKean Read Quote
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. Erin McKean Read Quote
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. Erin McKean Read Quote
