Erin McKean

We've been using 'rejuvenate,' meaning to restore youth, to make young again, as a verb for at least 200 years.

People say jargon is a bad thing, but it's really a shortcut vocabulary professionals use to understand one another.

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.

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

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

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

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!'

Words take on many different meanings.

Language is a nice way to remember things.

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.

A love letter is to be savored; a love email... is to be forwarded to all your friends, and probably laughed at.

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