Erin McKean Quotes & Sayings

“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.”

“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 refreshed with new ideas and perspectives.”

“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.”

“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 are so lovable. How could you not love words?”

“You can limit the number of invitations to an in-person fashion show, but you can't police the Internet.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”