People say jargon is a bad thing, but it's really a shortcut vocabulary professionals use to understand one another.
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.
All words have life cycles.
All language is a popularity contest.
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.
'Aging' has been bad ever since we figured out it led to dying.
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.
Part of the joy and pleasure of English is its boundless creativity: I can describe a new machine as bicyclish, I can say that I'm vitamining myself to stave off a cold, I can complain that someone is the smilingest person I've ever seen, and I can decide, out of the blue, that 'fetch' is now the word I want to use to mean 'cool.'
Words take on many different meanings.
We've been using 'rejuvenate,' meaning to restore youth, to make young again, as a verb for at least 200 years.
If you say 'anti-aging,' how anti would it have to be, really? My guess is not much. Any amount of sunscreen could be considered anti-aging.
There are very few good ways to get publicity for a dictionary.
What I'm interested in is how people are reading and writing English.
Language is a nice way to remember things.
If words are doing their job, then their novelty will not be the most noticeable thing about them.
It's difficult to choose a Word of the Year in the year that you're in. It's one of those things that hindsight makes more apparent. It's like looking at pictures from 10 years ago, and you notice the flannel and the ripped jeans. At the time, it didn't look to you like a real fashion trend.
I think we would all like to believe that every new event demands a new word. But we're environmentally conscious with our words. We recycle words we've got.
Writers who hedge their use of unfamiliar, infrequent, or informal words with 'I know that's not a real word,' hoping to distance themselves from criticism, run the risk of creating doubt where perhaps none would have naturally arisen.
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!'
There are hundreds of thousands of words that aren't in any print dictionary today... because there's no space for all of them.
