People say to me, ‘How do I know if a word is real?’ You know, anybody who’s read a children’s book knows… — Erin McKean Copy Share Image
Writers who hedge their use of unfamiliar, infrequent, or informal words with 'I know that's not a real word,' hoping to distance… — Erin McKean Copy Share Image
People say jargon is a bad thing, but it's really a shortcut vocabulary professionals use to understand one another. — Erin McKean Copy Share Image
Most of the words you know and love and use every day are not words you learned by looking them up in… — Erin McKean Copy Share Image
Part of the joy and pleasure of English is its boundless creativity: I can describe a new machine as bicyclish, I can… — Erin McKean Copy Share Image
The use of food metaphors is really well established English... Somebody is a peach, a hot tamale. — Erin McKean Copy Share Image
Most consumers don't have a good metric for deciding on whether the dictionary they want to use is a good one... so… — Erin McKean Copy Share Image
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… — Erin McKean Copy Share Image
“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… — Erin McKean Copy Share Image
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… — Erin McKean Copy Share Image
Almost any word can be drafted to serve as a verb, even words we think of as eternal and unchanging, stuck in their more… — Erin McKean Copy Share Image
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… — Erin McKean Copy Share Image
There are hundreds of thousands of words that aren't in any print dictionary today... because there's no space for all of them. — Erin McKean Copy Share Image
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… — Erin McKean Copy Share Image
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… — Erin McKean Copy Share Image
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… — Erin McKean Copy Share Image
If words are doing their job, then their novelty will not be the most noticeable thing about them. — Erin McKean Copy Share Image
