There’s much to disagree with in this interview with Wordnik founder and CEO Erin McKean—like when she says, “I truly believe that if something is used as a word, it’s a word.” But there’s also a lot to commend it:
Sometimes it seems as if people think that words just go into dictionaries to be preserved indefinitely, like pressed flowers. The dictionary is seen as this arbiter of the One True Answer to any question about a word, instead of a buffet of possible (and delicious) answers.
To fight this mistaken belief, I try to change the conversation from “is this word in the dictionary (and therefore a “good” word)?” to “what information is available about this word, and how can you use it to make a decision about this word’s fitness for your purpose?”
McKean makes a great point. And a bunch of others, for that matter. Read the whole thing.
