Language is the primary way we communicate with each other, and we have really strong feelings about what words mean, and about good language and bad. Those things are really based on sort of an agglutination of half-remembered rules from high school or college, and our own personal views on language and the things we grew up saying, the things we grew up being told not to say.

With "marriage," the word gets applied to same-sex marriages by proponents and opponents alike. That means the word itself is changing, and we reflect this change. But because of the idea that the dictionary is the objective voice of authority over culture and knowledge, it reads like approval. It's not a helpful way of looking at lexicography.

What makes autocorrect really interesting for a lexicographer is we read in a very weird way. A lot of times we'll catch things that are so clearly autocorrect typos, and you learn to tell the difference between an honest-to-goodness, ham-fisted typo and an autocorrect typo because the latter will not necessarily be a difference of one letter apart on the keyboard, which is usually what typos are, or it won't be the wrong its or the wrong there.

Words have always been political, and that means that, in many people's minds, dictionaries are political. Because that's what dictionaries do: they do words.

It's difficult to sit down and write a letter back saying, "you know what, even if we remove the word from the dictionary, people will still continue to use it." That's the tightrope that we walk - "gay marriage" is another example, or the word "nude."

You will hear people say the C-word. Except, it's a regional language: in British English, c - t has much less of an inflammatory sense than it does in North American English. You can hear someone on British TV called "a c - ting monkey" or a man being called a c - t. The particular fascination of profanity is how culturally specific it is and how it evolves.

Whenever you try and simplify how people speak, it's just hard to squish them into a simple rule. Language doesn't work that way.