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.

Most people, if they think at all about the dictionary, think of it as this fixed object given to us from on high. It is the thing that legitimizes language and makes language real. You never think that it's actually compiled by living, breathing nerds like me. When you realize that it's compiled by people, it becomes a different thing, a different kind of document.

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.

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.

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.

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.