I have enjoyed a professional career as a professor, a practicing lawyer and a writer.

I grew up in small-town Ontario, the first child of a father who was a successful businessman and an elected officeholder, and a mother who was an English and gym teacher and, in her youth, an accomplished athlete.

Encouraged by my mother and other teachers, I came to enjoy writing from an early age. My first published work was a limerick about an old man called Rover who heads off, trippingly, to Dover. Written when I was eight years old, the poem drew an expanded audience when it was published in my school’s yearbook. 

I recount this opening gambit into the literary world because I’ve now come full circle, as a grey-haired author, with my latest works, Signs of the Times and What If Jack Wasn't So Nimble, collections of light verse  that include several limericks.

During that huge gap between published poems, I became immersed in writing, in mundane prose, about the law. That’s the field in which I was engaged, successively, as a tutor in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, as a grad student in Cambridge, Mass., as a professor in Toronto, Ontario, as a visiting research fellow in Melbourne, Australia and, finally as a legal practitioner back in Toronto. Most of the law books that I authored were about the protection of privacy or the right of access to government information, certainly topical but not especially exciting for the non-lawyer.

Since choice of language is key to the precision of the law, I became attuned to the nuances of the written and spoken word. Then, in a little leap in logic, I came to think about some of the quirks of our language and the ways in which it can be used to humorous effect. So, in retirement from the law, I decided to write, in a lighter vein, about expressions and sayings and how we use and misuse them. That’s the subject of In a Manner of Speaking, which was published by Skyhorse Publishing of New York. As a one-time athlete as well as a language buff, I decided, fairly logically, that I would next explore the subject of Sports Talk: How It Has Penetrated Our Everyday Language, which became the title of my follow-up book. 

In keeping with this literary bent, I have been involved, in various volunteer roles, with a Canadian literacy organization, CODE, which supports reading and other educational programs across Africa. I was honoured, largely for my work with CODE, when I received the Louis Perinbam Award, in 1996, for excellence and leadership in the field of international development.