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.

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.

We want to emulate the educated class, even if we don't think of educated people as a class these days.

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.

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.

Lexicographers may be nerds who don't like human contact, but we're still people.

The history of English is full of that, lots of things done with good intentions that 200 years down the road have resulted in a giant mess, where someone's pet peeves - like John Dryden and his hatred of terminal prepositions - could become real standards.