Erin McKean Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

This is a little-known technological fact about the Internet, but the Internet is actually made up of words and enthusiasm.

Erin McKean
And I don't like people who eat powdered doughnuts. I don't car how careful you are, they're just plain messy. I can't believe they taste good enough to justify getting that sugar all over everything, especially me.

Erin McKean
I want to throw my big net into the deep blue ocean of English and see what marvelous creatures I can drag up from the bottom.

Erin McKean
If you don't know the provenance or the source of the artifact, it's not science, it's a pretty thing to look at.

Erin McKean
A definition is as convention-bound as a sonnet and usually more compact. Writing one is considered, at least by anyone who has ever tried it, something of an art.

Erin McKean
The dictionary is not carved out of a piece of granite, out of a lump of rock. It's made up of lots of little bits. It's little discrete — that's spelled D-I-S-C-R-E-T-E — bits. And those bits are words.

Erin McKean
If we can put in all the words, no longer have that artificial distinction between good and bad, we can really describe the language like scientists. We can leave the aesthetic judgments to the writers and the speakers. If we can do that, then I can spend all my time fishing, and I don't have to be a traffic cop anymore.

Erin McKean
Anybody who's read a children's book knows that love makes things real. If you love a word, use it. That makes it real.

Erin McKean
Online dictionaries replicate almost all the problems of print, except for searchability. And when you improve searchability, you actually take away the one advantage of print, which is serendipity. Serendipity is when you find things you weren't looking for, because finding what you are looking for is so damned difficult.

Erin McKean
Given these shortcomings of definitions, and the advantages of examples, why do we still cling to definitions? The short answer, for hundreds of years, has been a practical one: space — specifically the lack thereof.

Erin McKean
I'm not even talking about polysemy, which is the greedy habit some words have of taking more than one meaning for themselves.

Erin McKean
Singing when no one else is around is always good. I especially like belters. Good, loud singing is probably better medicine than half the stuff they sell in pill bottles, and it's cheaper, too. I also think people should never turn down an opportunity to hold a baby. There's something about the feel of a new baby in your arms that just fixes you.

Erin McKean
A word is so much more than its meaning: it's also who uses it, when it was used, what words appear alongside it and what kinds of texts it appears in.

Erin McKean
If we stop pretending definitions are science, we can enjoy them as a kind of literature — think of them as extremely nerdy poems — without burdening them with tasks for which they are unsuited.

Erin McKean
I don't want to be a traffic cop. For one thing, I just do not do uniforms. And for another, deciding what words are good and what words are bad is actually not very easy. And it's not very fun.

Erin McKean
Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked female.

Erin McKean
What if biologists could only study animals that made people go, "Aww." Right? What if we made aesthetic judgments about animals, and only the ones we thought were cute were the ones that we could study? We'd know a whole lot about charismatic megafauna, and not very much about much else.

Erin McKean