11 Quotes by Gretchen McCulloch

Like the big collaborative projects of the internet, such as Wikipedia and Firefox, like the decentralized network of websites and machines that make up the internet itself, language is a network, a web. Language is the ultimate participatory democracy. To put it in technological terms, language is humanity's most spectacular open source project.

Irony is a linguistic trust fall.

Sending someone all of the possible birthday party emoji is extra festive: great! But sending someone all of the possible phallic emoji (say, the eggplant and the cucumber and the corncob and the banana) is NOT extra sexxaayy: that’s a weird salad.

Even when something looks incoherent to an outsider, even when it's intended as incoherent for an insider, we as humans are still practically incapable of doing things without patterns.

The true emoji question is what billions of people are currently doing with emoji, not what an advertiser or a philosopher thinks they could hypothetically do with them.

Language is humanity's most spectacular open source project.

adding someone in social media is a way of ading them to the hallway you stroll down, a way of saying, "I might like to have more unplanned interactions with you, and we can see where things go from there.

Dictionaries are the record of how people are already using the language, not providers of words for us to start using.

...despite the fact that it's technically written in Old English rather than Old Icelandic, Icelanders would have an eaiser time learning to read Beowulf than would modern English speakers.