There's a measure of prescriptivism and descriptivism in every dictionary. Prescriptivism believes that the language should mirror the best practices of English, and editors are prescriptivist in so far as they don't want to let things they consider to be inelegant or ungrammatical into print.

A lot of people thought oh, we caught the dictionary in racism, or all it takes is a whole bunch of people saying that a word is bad for the dictionary to change it. That's not the case. For nude, things that are called nude color, that color palate has broadened very recently, in the last maybe seven to 10 years, and now covers all skin tones.

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.

Back in the 19th century, our marketing folks decided to play up the refined usage angle because prescriptivism was very popular: our dictionary is where you go to learn anything about anything. That really set the tone in North America for how people responded to dictionaries.

It's very easy, when things like the gay marriage write-in happen, to get sick of how people view language and say, "ah, come on it's just a dictionary." But then you hear from people who say if you take out "retarded" it won't exist anymore, and there will be no slurs for people to call my child. And that's just heartrending.

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.

I certainly self-police my language depending on who I'm talking to. I try to be very careful about using filler words, about not drawling certain vowels, even when I can't say "drawl" without drawling. That's kind of sad, because self-policing inhibits communication. You're more focused on the words coming out of your mouth or that should not be coming out of your mouth than making a connection with the person you're speaking to.