Adrienne

“Like the big collaborative projects of the internet, such as Wikipedia and Firefox, like the decentralized network of websites and machines that make up the internet itself, language is a network, a web. Language is the ultimate participatory democracy. To put it in technological terms, language is humanity's most spectacular open source project.”
― Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

“Sending someone all of the possible birthday party emoji is extra festive: great! But sending someone all of the possible phallic emoji (say, the eggplant and the cucumber and the corncob and the banana) is NOT extra sexxaayy: that’s a weird salad.”
― Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

“I find it a hard matter to settle to business after so much leisure and pleasure.”
― Samuel Pepys, The Diary Of Samuel Pepys

“Dictionaries are the record of how people are already using the language, not providers of words for us to start using.”
― Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language