Erin McKean: Redefining the dictionary
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All Comments (49)
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Guys, close your ears and listen. Totally sounds like Anne Hathaway eh!!!!
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Wow...she REALLY loves words
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@sophy95926 you should check out her website wordnik(dot)com . I was wondering what sort of online dictionary she was envisioning, too, and found the site on her twitter. It looks pretty cool from what I've seen so far.
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@AnarchyUnlimited Strangely enough, your last sentence describes how language actually works. She's not proposing that it should to work that way, she's proposing that more people should have a deeper understanding of how language works.
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@AnarchyUnlimited It's a common misconception that lexicographers come up with definitions on their own and the speakers of the languages are a secondary authority to the dictionaries. It's actually the complete opposite - lexicographers study how speakers of a language use the word and derive the definition from them. That's why they must be updated, because language evolves. Lexicographers (and most linguists in general) are descriptivists, not prescriptivists.
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You can fall in love of a brain :)
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Yeah, this woman is probably insane in bed.
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I'm really not sure what redefinition of the dictionary Erin is suggesting. She said that paper dictionaries can't hold enough words (now I'll always have to think about ham butt when I look things up), and online dictionaries lose the serendipity of finding unexpected words...so...then what? I thought she was going to have some new and exciting ideas for alternative dictionaries, but instead she just had some bad jokes.
She's such a geek...
And I love it.
jjqnario 3 years ago 27
I've fallen madly in love with Erin McKean.
mikedubya 3 years ago 21