Kory Stamper Quotes
Most popular Kory Stamper Quotes
English is a beautiful, bewildering language, and the deeper you dive into it, the more effort it takes to come up to the surface for air.
Lexicographers spend a lifetime swimming through the English language in a way that no one else does; the very nature of lexicography demands it.
The process of creating a dictionary is magical, frustrating, brain wrenching, mundane, transcendent. It is ultimately a show of love for a language that has been called unlovely and unlovable.
To be a lexicographer, you must be able to sit with a word and all its many, complex uses and whittle those down into a two-lined definition that is both broad enough to encompass the vast majority of the word's written use and narrow enough that it actually communicates something specific about this word—that "teeny" and "measly," for instance, don't refer to the same kind of smallness.
