Finding the words for fashion
New York Fashion Week ended last week, kicking off the new slew of international catwalks. It's the perfect storm of aesthetics, commerce and, if you follow that sort of thing, celebrity gossip. But for all the glitz and glam, it can be a little hard to follow. To our rescue is Erin McKean, a word nerd with a fashion bent. McKean has solid word credentials: She served as editor-in-chief of The New Oxford American Dictionary, second edition; she has written four books about words; and she founded the dictionary website Wordnik.com. But McKean also knows her clothes. She has written a novel called "The Secret Lives of Dresses," and she shares her adventures as a hobbyist seamstress in her blog, named A Dress A Day. "There's a bit of a disconnect between the language used by people who are really into fashion, either professionally or as a hobby, and people who don't care about fashion much, if at all. It's equivalent of the divide between peopl