About Erin McKean: Erin McKean is an American lexicographer, based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Experiences is just paying attention as time passes.
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 opportuni...
'Aging' has been bad ever since we figured out it led to dying.
We've been using 'rejuvenate,' meaning to restore youth, to make young again, as a verb for at least 200 years.
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 language is a popularity contest.
What I'm interested in is how people are reading and writing English.
Language is a nice way to remember things.
If words are doing their job, then their novelty will not be the most noticeable thing about them.
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.
Ideally my goal is, before I die, to have some information about every word that's ever been used in print.
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.
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 f...
You can limit the number of invitations to an in-person fashion show, but you can't police the Internet.
People say jargon is a bad thing, but it's really a shortcut vocabulary professionals use to understand one another.
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.
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.
Words take on many different meanings.
There are hundreds of thousands of words that aren't in any print dictionary today... because there's no space for all of 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.
