Editor Quotes

It's difficult to choose a Word of the Year in the year that you're in. It's one of those things that hindsight makes more apparent. It's like looking at pictures from 10 years ago, and you notice the flannel and the ripped jeans. At the time, it didn't look to you like a real fashion trend.
Language is a nice way to remember things.
Lexicographers are language reporters.
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 go to the back, and it says, 'Over 250,000 entries.' And they go, 'Great, this dictionary must be awesome!'
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.
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.
Part of the joy and pleasure of English is its boundless creativity: I can describe a new machine as bicyclish, I can say that I'm vitamining myself to stave off a cold, I can complain that someone is the smilingest person I've ever seen, and I can decide, out of the blue, that 'fetch' is now the word I want to use to mean 'cool.'
People say jargon is a bad thing, but it's really a shortcut vocabulary professionals use to understand one another.
The use of food metaphors is really well established English... Somebody is a peach, a hot tamale.
There are hundreds of thousands of words that aren't in any print dictionary today... because there's no space for all of them.
There are very few good ways to get publicity for a dictionary.
Twitter has already birthed an entire ecosystem of other sites that extend its power or interact with it. But Twitter isn't just a platform for technological innovation: It's showing signs as an engine of creativity for the language, too.
Twitter is like overhearing people's conversations, which is exactly what dictionary editors have been wishing we could do for years.
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 leotards aren't intimidating.
We think people go to a dictionary to find out what a word means. Most people go to the dictionary because they don't want to look stupid.
We've been using 'rejuvenate,' meaning to restore youth, to make young again, as a verb for at least 200 years.
What I'm interested in is how people are reading and writing English.
Words are so lovable. How could you not love words?
Words take on many different meanings.
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.
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