Quotes from Erin McKean

People say to me, 'How do I know if a word is real?' You know, anybody who's read a children's book knows that love makes things real. If you love a word, use it. That makes it real.

It doesn't really matter [if she ever wears the dress], as long as she loves it. She'll wear it a hundred times in her imagination before she even tries it on again. As long as she has the option of wearing it, she'll be happy.

I like someone who laughs, but not all the time, and not too loud. I like it when someone laughs at the world, and not at someone in particular — when some particularly absurd thing happens, not just someone falling down.

This isn't a thrift store… We're not selling them something less expensive, we're selling them something more special. We have to tell them the story of what we're showing them. And then we have to show them how they can be the new heroine in the story.

sometimes, it seems to me that, the smaller the things is that people want, the bigger the disappointment when they don't get it, or it's not exactly right -dora

I also think people should never turn down an opportunity to hold a baby. There's something about the feeling of a new baby in your arms that just fixes you.

And I don't like people who eat powdered doughnuts. I don't car how careful you are, they're just plain messy. I can't believe they taste good enough to justify getting that sugar all over everything, especially me.

Lexicographers are language reporters.

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.

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

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!'

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.

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.

If anything is guaranteed to annoy a lexicographer, it is the journalistic habit of starting a story with a dictionary definition.

If words are doing their job, then their novelty will not be the most noticeable thing about them.

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 finds it deeply annoying.

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.

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

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