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— Kory Stamper"It's difficult to sit down and write a letter back saying, "you know what, even if we remove the word from the dictionary, people will still continue to use it." That's the tightrope that we walk - "gay marriage" is another example, or the word "nude.""
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Language is a signifier - it points to something. But those somethings change sometimes. Where the line comes down is that change is not in the dictionary first, it's not: change the signifier and the signified will go away.
— Kory Stamper
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I think when dictionaries define words, there's a sort of hair-splitting that to most people doesn't make any sense, which is we're not describing what a thing is.
— Kory Stamper
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