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.

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.

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.

I make the case in the book that Standard English, that language we all aspire to live and move and have our being within, is actually based on a fiction. It's not anyone's native way of speaking or writing. That's why we have to take classes in it. Language is just really squishy.

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.

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.

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.