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.

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.

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.

It's very easy, when things like the gay marriage write-in happen, to get sick of how people view language and say, ah, come on it's just a dictionary. But then you hear from people who say if you take out retarded it won't exist anymore, and there will be no slurs for people to call my child. And that's just heartrending.

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

The history of English is full of that, lots of things done with good intentions that 200 years down the road have resulted in a giant mess, where someone's pet peeves - like John Dryden and his hatred of terminal prepositions - could become real standards.

Whenever you try and simplify how people speak, it's just hard to squish them into a simple rule. Language doesn't work that way.

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.

With marriage, the word gets applied to same-sex marriages by proponents and opponents alike. That means the word itself is changing, and we reflect this change. But because of the idea that the dictionary is the objective voice of authority over culture and knowledge, it reads like approval. It's not a helpful way of looking at lexicography.

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.