Arts News Canada: Literary Arts News :
Chances are, you actually speak Canadian
There are, according to Katherine Barber, at least 2,000 occasions on which Canadians put their regional differences aside, and use words and expressions that folks living in the rest of the world just wouldn’t understand….As editor-in-chief of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, which released its second edition last year, Barber is in a unique position to witness the ebb and flow of a language that too many Canadians believe to be simply a mix of American words and British spelling. “We have over 2,000 words that are unique to Canada in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary,” she says. “The thing that I find interesting about them is that they’re so ordinary. Words like butter tart. There are so many Canadians who don’t realize that butter tarts are unique to Canada. Butter tarts, poutine. There are all sorts of foods that are unique to Canada.” Barber points to words such as eavestrough, gravol and cheezies, the latter pair the generic forms of trademarked product names, as examples of words we consider common everywhere, but which are actually virtually unknown outside Canada….In many cases, it’s the meaning of the word, and not the word itself, that is distinctly Canadian. Collector, when referring to highway collector lanes, is uniquely Canadian….Barber and her staff constantly read Canadian publications, circling words that might merit addition to their database. On planes, she always finds something in En Route magazine….And proprietary words need not apply, at least not until they transcend their original definitions. So timbits, which is still strictly confined to Tim Hortons, will have to wait a while before it can snuggle in between timber wolf and timbre.
Calgary Herald??????????Posted on Friday November 11, 2005
To understand our Canadian identity we need to pay attention and celebrate the many little things that make us uniquely Canadian.