Erin McKean (born 1971) is an American lexicographer, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Read full biography of Erin McKean →
Uniforms are intended to make the wearer look as strong as possible. Soldiers could fight in leotards, but that's never going to happen because... →
If you're talking about how you promoted synergy in an organization, that could mean you just got everybody together for donuts twice a week.
Words are so lovable. How could you not love words?
Most consumers don't have a good metric for deciding on whether the dictionary they want to use is a good one... so they flip the book over, then... →
You can limit the number of invitations to an in-person fashion show, but you can't police the Internet.
For me, conferences are like little mental vacations: a chance to go visit an interesting place for a couple of days, and come back rested and... →
People say jargon is a bad thing, but it's really a shortcut vocabulary professionals use to understand one another.
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.
Ideally my goal is, before I die, to have some information about every word that's ever been used in print.
A love letter is to be savored; a love email... is to be forwarded to all your friends, and probably laughed at.
If anything is guaranteed to annoy a lexicographer, it is the journalistic habit of starting a story with a dictionary definition.
The use of food metaphors is really well established English... Somebody is a peach, a hot tamale.
'Aging' has been bad ever since we figured out it led to dying.
Erin McKean (born 1971) is an American lexicographer, based in the San Francisco Bay Area.