User:StanZegel
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Stan Zegel lives in the Chicago area, where he pursues his love of European History as time permits. His specialties are Austrian, German, and English history. He also has a strange passion for wanting to know the language and meaning of the surname borne by every person he meets. (Zegel is Dutch, meaning a signet, stamp or seal.)
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He is not as fluent in German as he would like to be, but finds it very useful in pursuing his historical interests. He is able to use it to add facts to the English Wikipedia from the German version, and to disambiguate titles that others may confuse as part of a name (see an example). It also helps him translate (v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y) sources written in Dutch when editing or creating a new article (see an example).
Having a natural inclination as a teacher (although not working as one), he likes to help readers by cross-indexing items and putting events into context so that actions can be judged by the standards of their time, and not today's standards. He loves to help draw out the Why (see an example), not just the What.
He is the primary author of the major article about the cathedral in Vienna, the imperial tombs in Vienna and other related topics.
He has retired as a newspaper publisher, and also published a scholarly zoological work Herpetarium Hibernae: An Illustrated Catalog of All Indiginous Species of Serpents of the Irish Isles.
He is blessed/cursed with the ability to recognize an inconsistency of terminology or facts or an uncanonical term when reading an article, and feels he must have been a copy editor in a previous life. (In this one he is merely pedantic.) Wikipedia lets him exercise those inclinations to fix things up.
Stan has participated in amateur dramatics for many years, and accepts only title-character parts. He is well known in the area for his portrayals of Harvey and Godot in the plays Harvey and Waiting for Godot and once managed to handle both roles in the same evening at two theatres five miles apart. He also often played the title role in Edward, My Son until he grew too old for the part.
Pet peeve: misplacement of adverbs of limitation, e.g. "he only did it five times" instead of the proper "he did it only five times."
Stan is a Kentucky Colonel, former city councilman and candidate for mayor.