World Wide Words

[Michael Quinion]

A little while ago, I wrote to you to explain that "personal 
circumstances" meant I was suspending publication of the newsletter. Some 
subscribers took this deliberately vague phrasing to mean that I was at 
death's door - as subscriber Keith McCartney put it, that I had just 
written my Captain Oates message. (If you don't get the allusion, look him 
up, and then face south and salute a man who was more brave than I can 
imagine.)

I have indeed been less than healthy and this week have had an operation. 
But it was to correct a serious misalignment of my foot, so hardly 
life-threatening. I was operated on and excellently cared for at Southmead 
Hospital in Bristol and was brought home by three cheerful ambulance men 
for whom nothing was too much trouble. I'm writing this with one leg in 
plaster propped up on a stool, with strict instructions not to put my 
weight on it for a fortnight, in a house that an occupational therapist 
has reconfigured for an elderly unfit hop-along casualty. None of this 
cost me a penny piece, thanks to the National Health Service.

This has almost nothing to do with my decision to cease writing World Wide 
Words. Truth be told, after 930 issues I was becoming written out. Every 
week that passed made writing more of a chore and less of a pleasure. 
About a year ago, closure of the freelance reading programme of the Oxford 
English Dictionary, to which I had contributed since 1992, meant that I 
had lost a key stimulus for investigating and writing about new words and 
- more recently - access to the online OED. Cuts to local authority 
library services have very recently severed access to a key British 
Library newspaper database.

I began to think that somebody was trying to tell me it was time to stop.

The clincher was my recent and rapidly growing association with a group 
building a local heritage railway: one which seeks to recreate a former 
period in British rail history using restored steam locomotives and 
rolling stock. I've taken on the job, as a volunteer, of organising the 
conservation, documentation and move of the large collection of a recently 
closed railway museum. This goes back to my earlier and longstanding 
involvement with museums, heritage interpretation and railway history. 
It's a challenge that I would be constitutionally unable to walk away 
from, even if I could at the moment. 

So I've decided to make my temporary suspension of the newsletter 
permanent. However, the World Wide Words website will continue as an 
archive and reference, as will the separate Affixes site. The 3000 pieces 
on the Words site should provide you with reading matter for a while.

For me it's not only an ending but also a beginning. I hope I move on with 
your good wishes.

Thanks go to everybody who has contributed to the newsletter since its 
faltering genesis in 1997 and helped to make it the success it became. And 
thank you for reading it. I wish you all the best in the future.


--
Michael Quinion
michael.quinion:worldwidewords.org
http://www.worldwidewords.org