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.

We're not saying that marriage, the thing, is now open to anyone of any gender. We are saying, when the word marriage is used in this particular context, this is what it means. And it was the same with "alternative facts." That was a big one. "Feminism" was a big one. And when people came to the "marriage" entry, because we live in the Internet age, they either immediately fire off an email to us saying they're horrified at how commie-pinko-liberal we are, or they fire off an e-mail saying thank you so much for speaking truth to power.

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.

I don't know that I would say words are more political now, particularly after Donald Trump has come into office. I will say that what I notice is that people pay more attention to the words that politicians use. They really want to understand the full nuance, the connotative meanings of those words.

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.

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.