Erin McKean Quotes

Ideally my goal is, before I die, to have some information about every word that's ever been used in print.

Several of us linguists at that time would record our own kids, just to get some data. There was some literature on it then, but no day-by-day, blow-by-blow examples. I recorded all my children over the years in some shape or form. It's what linguists do. You don't talk to a linguist without having what you say taken down and used in evidence against you at some point in time.

Twitter is like overhearing people's conversations, which is exactly what dictionary editors have been wishing we could do for years.

People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.

It doesn't take a language long to disappear once the spirit to continue with it leaves its community. In fact, the speed of the decline has been one of the main findings of recent linguistic research.

A lexicographer, a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.

I can't help but admire the structural linguists who have carved out for themselves a linguistic discipline based on the deterioration of written communication. Another case of men devoting their lives to studying more and more about less and less - filling volumes and libraries with the subtle linguistic analysis of the grunt.

The Hawaiian language needs to be studied globally as a language of life.

When I need to know the meaning of a word, I look it up in a dictionary.

If anything is guaranteed to annoy a lexicographer, it is the journalistic habit of starting a story with a dictionary definition.

It took three years to put Shakespeare's words together, there were a lot of words to be studied and a lot of words to be sorted out, and it proved to be a major project.

What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, to be the last of your people to speak your native tongue, to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the elders, to anticipate the promise of the children. This tragic fate is indeed the plight of someone somewhere roughly every two weeks.

You don't talk to a linguist without having what you say taken down and used in evidence against you at some point in time.

The knowledge of the ancient languages is mainly a luxury.

Languages like English, Spanish, and Chinese are healthy languages. They exist in spoken, written, and signed forms, and they're used by hundreds of millions of people all over the world. But most of the 6,000 or so of the world's languages aren't in such a healthy state.

The study of gender and language might seem at first to be a narrowly focused field, but it is actually as interdisciplinary as they come.

The Internet offers endangered languages a chance to have a public voice in a way that would not have been possible before.

There's nothing unusual about a single language dying. But what's going on today is extraordinary when we compare the situation to what has happened in the past. We're seeing languages dying out on a massive scale.

I'm left-brained, so I'm all about a mathematical approach to language. I've always been interested in that.

Descriptive grammar is an attempt to give an account of what the current system is for either a society or an individual, whatever you happen to be studying.

Wikipedia's a collaborative experiment akin to Simon Winchester's account of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary in 'The Professor and the Madman,' which outlines James Murray's mission to produce the tome in the 19th century.

I like to introduce a few lost gems when I can to fellow word-lovers, and would genuinely love some of them to make a comeback.

The one thing - apart from assumptions about German - that I have to challenge frequently is people assuming that lexicographers are fierce protectors of the language when in fact our job is not to put a lid on it.

Language is not just a code; you are writing into its history, into its tides.

I work with the Oxford Dictionary databases, which sounds really boring, but they're actually fascinating as they show you how current words are being used.