The initial 18th-, 19th-century intention was to give the less-educated lower classes a way to move up into this new, rising middle class, to enable them to fit in. So our view of language as being class-based is an unintended consequence of the drive to help educate rising businessmen.

The initial 18th-, 19th-century intention was to give the less-educated lower classes a way to move up into this new, rising middle class, to enable them to fit in. So our view of language as being class-based is an unintended consequence of the drive to help educate rising businessmen.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.