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If I searched for certain information and no one had made a web site about it, sometimes I started one. I made etymonline partly because I wanted a reliable place online to store research. This isn't altruism: I made things online so I could use them. You could learn basic HTML in about an hour by looking at the construction of other sites and fiddling with it. If you found something missing, and you were capable, you did it yourself. It felt like the natural thing to do - add to the corpus of fun or useful stuff online. Those who were using it also were creating it. I got online in 1995, I think, at the time when the Internet felt like a sub-world, an after-hours club for people who could man the tiller of Netscape Navigator and find an AOL dial-up number in their county. Those books are attempts to report the results of time travel. I did not attempt to keep a distance from the past I swam in it, and came up dripping. To write the Chester County books I immersed myself hours every day for years in censuses, old maps, letters, diaries, accounts, glass-plate photographs, deed books, minutes, newspaper morgues. But I have no truck with that I’m interested in the past on its own terms. It's not dishonest it's how they get anything done. A historian writing a book typically imposes a narrative on the past to make a point about the present, or to further an argument within his specialty. These are eccentric, but I mention them because they are in the family tree of etymonline. When I lived and worked there, I wrote a history of West Chester and a local Civil War history book, both of them published by the Chester County Historical Society. Currently I work as a newspaper "copy desk editor," a job that won't exist in a generation and possibly doesn't exist now. Actually it was more of a T-bone collision. But the jobs weren't there, so I drifted into print journalism. I went to a liberal arts college and got a BA in history, intending to teach high school. I was thought to be in need of remedial education for dyslexia had the diagnosis of Asperger syndrome been known then, I have been told I might have been given that. After 40 years of reading I find works and writers that cannot exhaust my interest. What I read is essential to what I write, but if you start listing titles it looks like showing off. It would be more true to say I taught myself to read only because I wanted to get what was inside that book - the information. Rey's "The Stars," when I was 4 or 5, but that wouldn't be quite right. I could say the first book I read was H.A.
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Prose of the most prosaic sort is where I find the best writing done, but I'm not going to waste your time trying to convince anyone else that a history of Cleveland street railway cars is as heartbreaking as the Iliad. Mostly old novels, poetry across the board, classics in translation, but I also loved the layman's explanations of scientific topics written by George Gamow, Asimov, and others. Growing up I read a great deal on my own. I find it suits me to be rooted here, in one landscape, for long enough to know not just the sights but the names of the stars that go over at night and the weeds and spiders and the family history of the ruined houses in the woods and the rocks in the road cuts. From nearness to them I learned the virtue of knowing more than one way to do a thing. I could say I've lived my whole life in the compass of ground that has the Philadelphia Quakers on one end and the Lancaster Amish on the other. I respect and encourage any religion that makes people generally better than I suspect they'd be without it. I was raised among and in part educated by Quakers, but have no faith personally. I was born in 1960 and have lived all of it in southeastern Pennsylvania, in Chester County and on the Main Line, though I live in neither place now. The old one still is where it was this one is about me as maker of the Online Etymology Dictionary, which is practically the only reason most people would be interested in any of this. When turned 10 a few years ago, the anniversary invited a new "who did this" page.