Erin McKean is a lexicographer and the founder of the Wordnik online dictionary. She received her AB/AM in linguistics from the University of Chicago in 1993 and has been both the Editor-in-Chief and the Chief Consulting Editor of American dictionaries for the Oxford University press. McKean and a small team founded Wordnik in 2008 as an aggregate dictionary that could pull the words in use from published online sources and create the most comprehensive dictionary of English usage possible. Wordnik now hosts citations and usage for millions of words.
In addition to overseeing the Wordnik Society, McKean also currently works for IBM as a developer advocate.
McKean’s Inversion was coined in 2011 by the writer John Scalzi, a friend of McKean’s from their UC days, in a blog post. Scalzi’s formulation of the inversion is,
“The adjective a person says they are is frequently the thing they are not.”
The motivating term for this principle was “classy” but there are many positive adjectives which are descriptive of others but, at best, aspirational when applied to oneself.
As a bonus feature, Erin McKean is also the coiner of McKean’s Law, which states,
“Any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling, or typographical error.”
It’s an Internet argument specialization of Murphy’s Law.