…to describe how excited we are about our keynote speaker, the wonderful Erin McKean! She should be able to help us out though: words are her profession.
This is what the “official bio” over at her blog says:

Erin McKean likes to call herself a Dictionary Evangelist. She is the CEO and co-founder of Wordnik, a new online dictionary project. Before founding Wordnik, she was Chief Consulting Editor, American Dictionaries for Oxford University Press, and the editor in chief of the New Oxford American Dictionary, 2e. She is the editor of VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly. and the author of Weird and Wonderful Words, More Weird and Wonderful Words, Totally Weird and Wonderful Words, and That’s Amore (also about words). Her first novel, The Secret Lives of Dresses is due out from Grand Central Publishing in 2011. She is a regular language columnist for the Boston Globe. Previously, she was the editorial manager for the Thorndike-Barnhart Dictionaries at ScottForesman, a Pearson company. She has served on the board of the Dictionary Society of North America and on the editorial board for its journal, Dictionaries, as well as on the editorial board for the journal of the American Dialect Society, American Speech. She also serves on the advisory board of Credo Reference, is on the Visiting Committee to the University of Chicago Libraries, and was previously an advisor to the Wikimedia Foundation. She lives in Chicago, rants about dresses on her blog (A Dress A Day), and she’s actually really bad at Scrabble (but surprisingly good at roller-skating).

She has presented at TED, is a brilliant speaker and we’re very happy (rapturous? blithe? elated?) to have her.