Michael was a gentleman and a scholar--that hackneyed characterization which brilliantly reclaims its puissance where CMSM is the exceptio probans regnum. I met Michael in 1999 and in our first conversation remarked that the previous year we had both given talks entitled "Say what you mean; mean what you say"-- though in circumstances, and with conclusions so wildly different as to be incommensurate within any realistically imaginable context. Michael was the consummate Aristotelian, and unquestionably an ornament of that long and honourable tradition. He devoted a diligent career to superclassing from difficult cases to a broader context where ambiguities might be resolved in elucidating differentiating attributes of overlapping specimens (though he did admit that consulting with Murata-san on ambiguities elucidated in translating the XML spec to Japanese led him to at least reevaluate his Aristotelian principles).

Michael found his perfect expression in the TEI and its progeny, as the TEI found its diligent and patient Aristotelian advocate in Michael. I went the opposite direction, as the Heraclitan bomb-thrower insisting that hyper-specificity is the only true resolution of ambiguity, even if it results in a concordance full of hapax legomena (I was after all fronting a company called net.uniqueness). In our respective 1998 talks on saying and meaning, Michael of course advocated for taxonomic precision as the cure for ambiguity, while I had taken the position of the March Hare and the Mad Hatter that there can be no commutative property in semantics (as demonstrated in the quaternion algebra of William Rowan Hamilton, which Lewis Carroll was parodying). I have not seen Michael since 2011, the last time I attended Balisage, but for a dozen years I had the distinct pleasure of back-and-forth teasing with Michael on whether he was ready to give up his Aristotelian faith or I was ready to give up my Hamiltonian one. In his closing of Balisage 2010 Michael gave me the single acknowledgment that I have always wanted, and it is the only time that I have ever been granted it: in more than 50 years of advocating that identity is properly understood as a verb and not as a noun, I had the unique pleasure of hearing Michael conclude "I think Walter Perry is a verb." Farewell, Michael. "Earth, receive an honoured guest."