Sun.com Customer Experience and Stuff: Notes from the Sun.com customer experience team.

The people who chronicle the life of our language, by compiling and editing dictionaries, are called lexicographers. I met a really cool lexicographer last week named Erin McKean.

I think Erin was born to be a lexicographer, though she told my friend she only knew for sure when she was eight years old after she read a newspaper article about the job. She must have been pretty persistent, because now she's Editor-in-Chief at the New Oxford American Dictionary, where she spends her days and nights reading everything from blog postings to great historic works, all in search of new words and new uses. And also, sadly, to monitor which words are falling into disuse, down a spiral to "archaic" or, worse, "dead."

But the coolest thing is that Erin runs the Dress a Day blog, which, if you're a fan or consumer of dresses, is apparently quite the thing and where you can enjoy a new dress, if only vicariously, "mostly every day." I just showed Dress a Day to my fashion-appreciative daughter and she pronounced it to be "a very neat blog."

As you can tell from the picture below, Erin lives her blog.



(Left to right that's Michael Geminder from Apple, Erin McKean, and me. Don't Michael and I look a bit underdressed?)

P.S. See this interesting guest blog from Erin about what lexicographers do.

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