Erin McKean

Erin McKean, a lexicographer for the OED, ran a workshop on the first day about how to create new words. I attended this and learnt about how English shamelessly borrows words from other cultures, how new words are created through various Frankensteinian operations, and how new words are added to the OED. Erin is exactly the kind of person you’d like to be in charge of your language: not a literature scholar, but a true word geek, gladly embracing new words and repeatedly quoting the Simpsons (cromulent anyone?).

More importantly, I won third place in the word creation contest. “Mispronoonce” is a variation of mispronounce to be used after a particularly embarassing mispronunciation. It can only be used in the first person, as in “oh god, I mispronoonced that…”. You can read more about the contest on Erin’s blog, and here is a video of a talk she gave at Pop!Tech.

[picture by Neil Hunt]