Erin McKean: Redefining the dictionary

http://www.ted.com Is the beloved paper dictionary doomed to extinction? In this infectiously exuberant talk, leading lexicographer Erin McKean looks at the many ways today's print dictionary is poised for transformation.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers are invited to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes -- including speakers such as Jill Bolte Taylor, Sir Ken Robinson, Hans Rosling, Al Gore and Arthur Benjamin. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, politics and the arts. Watch the Top 10 TEDTalks on TED.com, at
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Education

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• Erin
• McKean
• TED
• TEDTalks
• Talks
• lexicography
• dictionary
• Verbatim

[jjqnario]

She's such a geek...

And I love it.

[mikedubya]

I've fallen madly in love with Erin McKean.

[joelryan365]

Guys, close your ears and listen. Totally sounds like Anne Hathaway eh!!!!

[crudhousefull]

Wow...she REALLY loves words

[sarcasticwhiteboard]

@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.

[sarcasticwhiteboard]

@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.

[sarcasticwhiteboard]

@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.

[orprado]

You can fall in love of a brain :)

[hymnofashes]

Yeah, this woman is probably insane in bed. 

[sophy95926]

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.