Erin McKean

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

People say jargon is a bad thing, but it's really a shortcut vocabulary professionals use to understand one another. ”

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. ”

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

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

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

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!' ”

Words take on many different meanings. ”

Language is a nice way to remember things. ”

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. ”