I’ve been writing ever since Mr. Scott in high school journalism class said I had style.  I had no idea what that meant, but I knew that Mr. Talley, the physics teacher, never said I had anything.  In college, I fell into sports writing, then in my career as a linguistic missionary, I wrote about anything linguistic that I thought somebody would be interested in.  Winding down as a missionary, I started freelance writing, and this time, I wrote anything that somebody would pay me for.  There was a relatively long hiatus when I named things for a living, first with The Richards Group in Dallas, then with a group we called Name One!  Names for companies and products required creativity, but they tended to be shorter than magazine articles.  In retirement since around 2008, I’ve taken up the wordy stuff again.  It’s this last period that will be posted here, unless of course I think of a bi of linguistics, or a cool name, that earns a place.  We’ll see.

Mountain Snail?  My wife and I live on a mountain in Western North Carolina, and we’re not at all ambitious.  The snail is our family totem.  The (future) Mountain Snail logo comes from our wedding invitation.

Lee Ballard