27 Quotes by Kory Stamper

Lexicography moves so slowly that scientists classify it as a solid.

Real defining answers questions like “What is truth?” “What is love?” “Do sounds exist if no one is around to hear them?” and “Is a hot dog a sandwich?

OMG” goes back to 1917, when it was first used in a letter to Winston Churchill.

Removing racial slurs from the dictionary will not eliminate racism; removing “injustice” from the dictionary will not bring about justice. If it were really as easy as that, don’t you think we would have removed words like “murder” and “genocide” from the dictionary already? Jerkery, like stupidity and death, is an ontological constant in our universe.

In the sixteenth century, English was established as a language of record;.

Standard English as it is presented by grammarians and pedants is a dialect that is based on a mostly fictional, static, and Platonic ideal of usage.

I am the world’s biggest epistemophilic dork.

Yes, this is what I want to do. I want to sit alone in a cubicle all day and think about words and not really talk to anybody else. That sounds great!

Singeth” wasn’t just a highfalutin flourish deployed to lend a sense of elevation and elegance to Shakespeare’s writings; “singeth” was a normal, boring way to say “sing” in the late sixteenth century. And it happened to be a holdover from Anglo-Saxon. We used “singeth” as the third-person form longer than we used “sings.