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Fiske graduated from Friends World College, a quirky college that sent its students around the world in an effort to promote understanding among people. He spent six months in East Africa, and a year and a half in Western Europe.

This time out of the country made Fiske aware of the abuse of English: "When I returned, many years ago, to the United States after studying for 25 months in Africa and Europe, I was astonished by how people spoke the English language. It was as though I were hearing people for the first time. I became preternaturally conscious of how people spoke, the nonsense of so much of it, the dimwitticisms people relied on," he says.

Before joining Addison-Wesley Publishing Company as an editor, he wrote plays and worked as a milkman ("It's I, the milkman," he once intoned), artist's model, and waiter. Today, he writes books, publishes The Vocabula Review (www.vocabula.com), and works as a freelance editor. That is, he struggles to earn a living -- surely, the fate of anyone with a mind of his own and a distaste for corporate life.