A. D. Reed is a writer and editor who operates the editorial service My Own Editor (www.myowneditor.com) and founded the North Carolina-based publishing imprint Pisgah Press LLC (www.pisgahpress.com). A lover of languages since childhood, he grew up with a multilingual, Canadian-born Russian émigrée mother who spoke English with a flat Cleveland, Ohio, accent and Russian like a lifelong Muscovite; a father from a south Georgia farm family who spoke carefully and precisely (like many a self-conscious, self-made man) though with a noticeable drawl; an elder sister who became an acclaimed editor in Canada and the Cayman Islands, and an older brother who, after careers as a librarian and teacher (and writing poetry), nits and picks with the best of them. Their extended family and friends spoke southern, Appalachian, British, Anglo-German, Greek-American, deep country, and transplanted-New-Yorker dialects, among many others-all of which Reed listened to and absorbed with fascination. He studied French, German, Greek, Italian, Latin, and Russian as a high school and college student, becoming fluent in some languages, competent in others; but his first love remains the elegant, flexible, surprising, often incomprehensible, sometimes ridiculous, always delightful mélange of tongues that has gradually evolved into the modern American English language.