I’m Paul Bowman of Maryland, in the USA. Quareidfaciam.net is my personal site. Right now it’s in sort of a transitional condition, and it may be a little while before it’s working well and I’m using it consistently.
‘Quare id faciam’ is something I appropriated from a school text for basic Latin verse translation — from 2nd-year college Latin, which is as far as my Latin extends. Ten years or so ago, when I was in need of a username for some online service I can’t recall any more, the notion came to me to find something from the Latin I’d had, some word or phrase that would be distinctive and that no one else out there (more to the point) would likely be using. I browsed a little, and this snippet from Catullus’ couplet beginning ‘Odi et amo …’ seemed to fit my purpose. (You can hear Helen Mirren, as Elizabeth I, read the whole bit starting just about 60 seconds into this Youtube clip.)
My snippet, ‘quare id faciam,’ also had the appealing quality of being a little grammatically & semantically ambiguous when extracted from its context. Isolated, the tense works out as future rather than present, and it’s no longer clear whether facere should be taken, in English, as ‘do’ or ‘make.’
Anyway, I kept using quareidfaciam as a username in various situations, and finally I registered the domain name. Is it silly & maybe a little pretentious for someone who doesn’t really know much Latin, and Latin literature much less, to borrow an online name/identity from his college translation primer? Sure. — But I’ve gotten used to using it, and obviously there’s still no competition for it.
And this skeletal reflection, ‘Why will I, why do I … ?’ isn’t yet without significance for me.
— Paul, Aug. 2008