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MICHAEL QUINION After Cambridge University, where he studied physical sciences, he joined BBC radio as a studio manager. “The job was a fascinating blend of the techie and the creative artist,” he says. “Though much of the time you were dogsbody, equipment operator and referee rolled into one”. After that, he helped to start local radio in Britain, at Brighton, where he produced programmes about the countryside, consumer affairs, books, religion, student life and the local and general elections. He then moved to Plymouth, where he helped to start a breakfast-time two-hour sequence of news and local features.  Reproduced by courtesy of the Bristol Evening Post A chance encounter with the warden of a local visitor attraction led him to make a slide-tape programme for its visitors. “I didn’t know this was new; it just seemed interesting. It was only when people started to come from all over Britain to see it, and then ask me if I could make one for them, that I realised”. For four years he ran his own business making interpretive audio-visual programmes for most of the national agencies in Britain and many visitor attractions. Another chance encounter led him to his next post as curator of the Cider Museum in Hereford. He planned and developed this museum from an idea in the trustees’ minds to its opening, running research and conservation projects and fund-raising by the then new way in modern Britain of a public scratchcard lottery. “One lady in a group I was lecturing to said that it was bad enough to be creating a visitor attraction about alcoholic drink, without using gambling to pay for it!” He wrote two books about orcharding and cidermaking, one just called Cidermaking from Shire Publications, the other A Drink for its Time, published by the Museum. After that he returned to working for himself, writing scripts for exhibitions, taking on a freelance curatorial role, creating audio-visual programmes, and became more closely involved with planning visitor attractions. In 1986, with an old friend, Michael Glen, he formed Touchstone Associates, a consultancy business that undertook feasibility studies, tourism planning, visitor facility planning, and the development of visitor attractions. These days, Michael concentrates on writing World Wide Words and providing citations and advice for the Oxford English Dictionary. He also wrote a third of the entries for the second edition of the Oxford Dictionary of New Words and for a while compiled a weekly New Words column in the Daily Telegraph. His dictionary of affixes, Ologies and Isms, was published by Oxford University Press in August 2002. His next, Port Out, Starboard Home: And Other Language Myths, was published in the UK by Penguin Books in 2004, was serialised in the Daily Telegraph and was for a while on the British best-seller lists; a US edition, entitled Ballyhoo, Buckaroo, and Spuds, has been published by the Smithsonian Institution Press and now in paperback by HarperCollins. In October 2006, his Gallimaufry, about words that are vanishing from the language, was published by the Oxford University Press. |
