fawny.org & Joe ClarkSince you’re reading my personal site (as opposed to the business site), let me take this opportunity to bring you up to speed on some personal details.
I work in the field of accessibility for people with disabilities, I am a writer, and I have a strong interest in typography.
I also have an interest in minority languages, about which, apart from doing a lot of reading, I have not yet come up with a way for me to do anything significant. (The language I seem to have the greatest interest in is Breton, for some reason. And it isn’t even significantly threatened compared to hundreds of other languages I could name.) The only thing I have been able to do is attend a conference in Iceland and deliver a benediction in Icelandic, a minority language that has evolved but has not changed significantly in 700 years. I was able to play a part in the preservation of this language; since Icelanders have defended and always will defend Icelandic to the utmost, my contribution is rather small, but it is what I could do.
I do actually have a B.A. in linguistics (University of Toronto, 1989, though I spent two years at McGill). I am interested in the topic because each language brings with it a way of thinking, and to expunge a language is to expunge thought, a crime against conscience.
It’s explained in the Redhead Cluster Phenomenon’s History section (though the citation below is from yet another document. It all leads back to red-haired eyelashes (yes).
Beyond that, the word is somewhat magical. Five letters seldom seen in sequence that actually look good together – one reason I rotate fonts in my header graphics. The word is a rarity, sounds delicate, and defines a delicate colouration. Yet the men to whom I refer with that word are strong, tough, masculine – an enjoyable opposition. Tough guys eat quiche and sport light-brownish eyelashes.
Fawny has overtones of Chinese baptismal names like Chauncey (you half-expect a woman named Fawny also to be named Hor-Cheung Lau) and the ancient female given name, now the butt of schoolyard jokes, Fanny. It is an aggressively unmasculine name, even though I could not be described the same way.
I’ve been published nearly 400 times in about three dozen periodicals: Applied Arts, Axess, Bicycle Retailer & Industry News, Billboard, BusinessWeek, De Wereldfietser, Details, Disability Rag, the Economist, Entertainment Weekly, Eye, the Globe and Mail, I.D., MacUser, McGill Daily, Men’s Journal, NetGuide, OutWeek, Performance (Canada Post organ), Physician’s Fitness, Playback, Popular Science, Print, Publish, Ray Gun, Rehabilitation Digest, Serif, SOCAN Probe, Technology Review, The Face, This Old House, Toronto Computes, the Toronto Star, Vibe, Vibrations, the Village Voice, Xtra, and Xtra West. I’ve edited books (on design), magazine articles, scientific questionnaires and manuscripts, and Web pages.
Most importantly of all, I wrote a book, Building Accessible Websites. I have others in progress.
Yes, actually. The list is available at the Writing page.
Leslieville, Toronto. I have lived in Toronto since 1987, with Montreal before that. I’m from Moncton, New Brunswick, though I was born on Prince Edward Island.
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Updated 2008.01.21