Fred Shapiro

Fred first touched a wink in the Fall of 1971 as a 16-year-old Freshman at MIT.  One of the iconoclasts of winkdom, Fred leveraged his linkages to the MIT press moguls (both at The Tech and at Thursday) for the betterment of winks, publishing winks articles under the noses of unsuspecting editors.  After an heroic MIT career, he engaged himself at Harvard Law School and also Catholic University in Washington DC, though more importantly he established himself as a principal contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary of many words and usages, including all consequential words of winkdom.   From 1978 onward, along with Rick Tucker, he delved into the origins and history of tiddlywinks, from ages past to the modern world, and wrote seminal articles on winks, including the encyclopedic Fleas which first published the parable, The Great White Wink.  Fred is now at the Yale Law Library and has published a number of books in the research realm.  His latest and greatest book, published in 2006, is the Yale Book of Quotations.