Top 45 Erin Mckean Quotes
#3. By the time the traditionally male lexicographers become interested in looking at fashion words, their origins are lost in the mists of time.
Erin McKean
#4. You can limit the number of invitations to an in-person fashion show, but you can't police the Internet.
Erin McKean
#5. Singing is probably the better medicine than half the stuff they sell in pill bottles, and it's cheaper, too.
Erin McKean
#6. Ideally my goal is, before I die, to have some information about every word that's ever been used in print.
Erin McKean
#7. 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.
Erin McKean
#8. 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.
Erin McKean
#9. 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
Erin McKean
#10. Twitter is like overhearing people's conversations, which is exactly what dictionary editors have been wishing we could do for years.
Erin McKean
#11. You can weaponize nice ... Being nice can make you be a little underestimated.
Erin McKean
#12. 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.
Erin McKean
#13. 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.
Erin McKean
#14. Words are so lovable. How could you not love words?
Erin McKean
#15. 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.
Erin McKean
#16. 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.
Erin McKean
#17. If words are doing their job, then their novelty will not be the most noticeable thing about them.
Erin McKean
#18. 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.
Erin McKean
#19. A love letter is to be savored; a love email ... is to be forwarded to all your friends, and probably laughed at.
Erin McKean
#20. Language is a nice way to remember things.
Erin McKean
#21. The rule is, don't speak of the dead, not don't speak ill of the dead's terrible relatives.
Erin McKean
#22. 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.
Erin McKean
#23. If you want someone to stop listening to you go ahead and yell. If you want them to listen to every word, whisper. -Mimi
Erin McKean
#24. We've been using 'rejuvenate,' meaning to restore youth, to make young again, as a verb for at least 200 years.
Erin McKean
#25. 'Aging' has been bad ever since we figured out it led to dying.
Erin McKean
#26. 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.
Erin McKean
#27. 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.
Erin McKean
#28. There are very few good ways to get publicity for a dictionary.
Erin McKean
#29. The use of food metaphors is really well established English ... Somebody is a peach, a hot tamale.
Erin McKean
#30. 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.
Erin McKean
#31. 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.
Erin McKean
#32. 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.
Erin McKean
#33. If anything is guaranteed to annoy a lexicographer, it is the journalistic habit of starting a story with a dictionary definition.
Erin McKean
#34. 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!'
Erin McKean
#35. 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.
Erin McKean
#37. 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.
Erin McKean
#39. 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.
Erin McKean
#40. People say jargon is a bad thing, but it's really a shortcut vocabulary professionals use to understand one another.
Erin McKean
#41. Experiences is just paying attention as time passes.
Erin McKean
#42. Serendipity is when you find things you weren't looking for because finding what you are looking for is so damned difficult.
Erin McKean
#43. 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
#44. What I'm interested in is how people are reading and writing English.
Erin McKean
#45. 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.
Erin McKean
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