27 Quotes by Kory Stamper

Ei,” he said, shaking his head. “En puhu suomea.” No, he said in Finnish. I don’t speak Finnish.

Most words come into being first in speech, then in private writing, and then in public, published writing, which means that if the date given at the entry marks the birth of a word, the moment when it went from nothing to something, then Merriam-Webster must have an underground vault full of clandestine recordings of each word’s first uttering, like something out of the Harry Potter books, only less magical.

Then Eric talked for half an hour about the Albanian word for.

We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets.

I didn’t draft the entry for “surfboard,” but I have reviewed it more times than I’ve actually seen a surfboard in the wild.

Dude, do you even English? That defining job is hella bad.

Under ordinary circumstances, we learn to speak before we learn to read, and anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language knows that the gold standard of fluency isn’t your reading comprehension but your ability to ask a native speaker of that language which team they favor in the World Cup and to fully understand and participate in the argument that will inevitably ensue.

English has a lot of synonyms for “fool” or “idiot.” Perhaps you take this to mean that English speakers are mean-spirited; I simply reply that necessity is the mother of invention.

It is the fate of those who toil at the lower employments of life, to be rather driven by the fear of evil, than attracted by the prospect of good; to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise; to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been without applause, and diligence without reward. Among these unhappy mortals is the writer of dictionaries.