About Erin McKean: Erin McKean is an American lexicographer, based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Twitter is like overhearing people's conversations, which is exactly what dictionary editors have been wishing we could do for years.
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.
If anything is guaranteed to annoy a lexicographer, it is the journalistic habit of starting a story with a dictionary definition.
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.
The use of food metaphors is really well established English... Somebody is a peach, a hot tamale.
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.
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 d...
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 awesom...
There are very few good ways to get publicity for a dictionary.
All words have life cycles.
Words are so lovable. How could you not love words?
A love letter is to be savored; a love email... is to be forwarded to all your friends, and probably laughed at.
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.
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...
By the time the traditionally male lexicographers become interested in looking at fashion words, their origins are lost in the mists of time.
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 did...
