Erin McKean Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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.

You can limit the number of invitations to an in-person fashion show, but you can't police the Internet.

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!'

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.

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

Ideally my goal is, before I die, to have some information about every word that's ever been used in print.

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

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

Aging has been bad ever since we figured out it led to dying.

The use of food metaphors is really well established English... Somebody is a peach, a hot tamale.

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

What I'm interested in is how people are reading and writing English.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

By the time the traditionally male lexicographers become interested in looking at fashion words, their origins are lost in the mists of time.

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

Language is a nice way to remember things.

There are very few good ways to get publicity for a dictionary.

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.

There are hundreds of thousands of words that aren't in any print dictionary today... because there's no space for all of them.

Twitter is like overhearing people's conversations, which is exactly what dictionary editors have been wishing we could do for years.

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.

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.

if you want someone to stop listening to you go ahead and yell. If you want them to listen to every word, whisper. -Mimi

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 opportunity to hold a baby. There's something about the feel of a new baby in your arms that just fixes you.

You can weaponize nice... Being nice can make you be a little underestimated.

Experiences is just paying attention as time passes.

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.

Serendipity is when you find things you weren't looking for because finding what you are looking for is so damned difficult.

All language is a popularity contest.

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.

Lexicographers are language reporters.

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.

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 in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘female’.