Public Biography
Walter P. Stanfield is an inventory manager at Lansing-Scarborough Plumbing & Valve Supply in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where he has been employed since 1997. He is a member of the Greater Washtenaw Star Trek Society and an intermittent citizen-commentator at meetings of the Washtenaw County Board of Zoning Appeals.
Mr. Stanfield is known among his acquaintances — and, as of 2026, among a somewhat wider public — for his habit of exclaiming “Jaunty Look, Petard!” whenever he believes an argument, claim, or civic proposal has contradicted itself. Mr. Stanfield understands the phrase to be a quotation by Captain Jean-Luc Picard of William Shakespeare’s idiom “hoist with his own petard,” delivered as a rhetorical coup de grâce in an unspecified episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. He reports having used the phrase at approximately weekly intervals since 2015.
The phrase does not appear in any episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, nor in any of the feature films, spin-off series, novelizations, or ancillary canonical materials in which Captain Picard figures as a character. Linguists who have been asked to evaluate the construction describe it as a mondegreen — a misheard phrase that has stabilized, in the speaker’s memory, as a discrete utterance — and, in the assessment of at least one specialist in historical semantics, “nearly perfect.”
Mr. Stanfield, 58, was born in Jackson, Michigan, and graduated from Eastern Michigan University in 1989 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration. He has lived in Ypsilanti since 1995 and on Perrin Street since 2002. He is married to Marlene Stanfield, a dental hygienist, and has two adult children, neither of whom lives in the state of Michigan.