Best quotes by Erin McKean on Words

Checkout quotes by Erin McKean on Words

• ‟ All words have life cycles.

  - Erin McKean
  

• ‟ Almost any word can be drafted to serve as a verb, even words we think of as eternal and unchanging, stuck in their more traditional roles.

  - Erin McKean
  

• ‟ Words take on many different meanings.

  - Erin McKean
  

• ‟ If words are doing their job, then their novelty will not be the most noticeable thing about them.

  - Erin McKean
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Erin McKean
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Erin McKean
  

• ‟ There are hundreds of thousands of words that aren't in any print dictionary today... because there's no space for all of them.

  - Erin McKean
  

• ‟ Objections to verbification in English tend to be motivated by personal taste, not clarity. Verbed words are usually easily understood. When a word like 'friend' is declared not a verb, the problem isn't that it's confusing; it's that the protester finds it deeply annoying.

  - Erin McKean
  

• ‟ Words are so lovable. How could you not love words?

  - Erin McKean
  

• ‟ By the time the traditionally male lexicographers become interested in looking at fashion words, their origins are lost in the mists of time.

  - Erin McKean
  

• ‟ Most of the words you know and love and use every day are not words you learned by looking them up in a dictionary and reading a definition.

  - Erin McKean