Erin McKean Quotes

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

Lexicographers are language reporters.

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'.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The rule is, don't speak of the dead, not don't speak ill of the dead's terrible relatives.

Singing is probably the better medicine than half the stuff they sell in pill bottles, and it's cheaper, 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.

Words take on many different meanings.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!'

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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