27 Quotes by Kory Stamper

Words hurt, because they are one of the only socially accepted ways we can attack each other

It is best, in fact, to assume that every verbal illustration you write will offend someone, somewhere, at some point.

Etymological fallacy is the worst sort of pedantry: a meaningless personal opinion trying to dress itself up as concern for preserving historical principles. It misses that language change itself is a historical principle: a language that doesn't change is a dead language

It wasn’t story (good or bad) that pulled me in; it was English itself, the way it felt in my braces-caged mouth and rattled around my adolescent head.

ALL words are made-up: Do you think we find them fully formed on the ocean floor, or mine from them in some remote part of Wales?

Sometimes we are mush mouths because we like symmetry.

It’s not all “molly” and “asshat.” The etymologies of some words are, for the lexicographer and average joe alike, boring.

People do not come to the dictionary for excitement and romance; that’s what encyclopedias are for. They.

Linguists love corpora; where two or three linguists are gathered, there shall you find heavy-breathing fetishism about the size, scope, all those possibilities, all that data.