47 Quotes by Erin McKean

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.