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Erin McKean [1971-0] American

Rank: 102
Editor, Lexicographer

Erin McKean is an American lexicographer, based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Chance

Quote	Tags	Rank
People say jargon is a bad thing, but it's really a shortcut vocabulary professionals use to understand one another.		101
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.		102
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.		103
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.		104
Words are so lovable. How could you not love words?		105
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.	Chance	106
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.		107
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.		108
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!'		109
You can limit the number of invitations to an in-person fashion show, but you can't police the Internet.		110
'Aging' has been bad ever since we figured out it led to dying.		111
We've been using 'rejuvenate,' meaning to restore youth, to make young again, as a verb for at least 200 years.		112
What I'm interested in is how people are reading and writing English.		113
All words have life cycles.		114
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.		115
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.'		116
Ideally my goal is, before I die, to have some information about every word that's ever been used in print.		117
The use of food metaphors is really well established English... Somebody is a peach, a hot tamale.		118
A love letter is to be savored; a love email... is to be forwarded to all your friends, and probably laughed at.		119
If anything is guaranteed to annoy a lexicographer, it is the journalistic habit of starting a story with a dictionary definition.		120
Words take on many different meanings.		121
There are very few good ways to get publicity for a dictionary.		122
All language is a popularity contest.		123
Language is a nice way to remember things.		124
If words are doing their job, then their novelty will not be the most noticeable thing about them.		125
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.		126
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.		201
There are hundreds of thousands of words that aren't in any print dictionary today... because there's no space for all of them.		202
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.		203
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.		204
Twitter is like overhearing people's conversations, which is exactly what dictionary editors have been wishing we could do for years.		205
Lexicographers are language reporters.		206
By the time the traditionally male lexicographers become interested in looking at fashion words, their origins are lost in the mists of time.		207
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.		208

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