People wear Canada-themed shirts at a Canada Day celebration in Ottawa on Tuesday.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
Have you ever been asked to really give’r but ended up in a gong show? Gone to buy a freezie and some Cheezies only to be dinged with the GST? Gotten into a kerfuffle with an old winterer?
You’ve been speaking Canadian. A collection of our national expressions with the fittingly unflashy title A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, Third Edition has just been updated with more than a 100 words and phrases that are defiantly ours. The online publication by the University of British Columbia’s Department of English Language and Literatures goes way beyond “eh.”
The compendium is a reminder of just how distinctive our version of the English language is – and a window into Canada’s peculiar story and character at a time when patriotism is on the rise. Naturally, the new additions include “elbows up.”
Hockey terms proliferate, as you would expect (rink rat, goal suck, deke as both noun and verb). There are more than 90 words that refer to ice (did you know a pingo is a mound of ice covered with soil?) and more than 100 about snow.
Originally published in 1967 to coincide with Canadian Centennial celebrations, the dictionary contains a rich historical vocabulary that harks back to Canada’s early nature-battling history, when a factory was a fur-trading post not a manufacturing facility. Colourful terms for the particularities of landscape are everywhere (oak opening, lightening place, drunken forest, drowned lands).
Isolation pay, cabin fever and calendar stick speak to our vast lonely expanses, as do the endless modes of conveyance for traversing them: the tote-sleigh for carrying provisions to a lumber camp, the horse-drawn carioles used in snowy French-Canadian winters, the sealskin-covered flat boats known as oomiaks used mainly by Inuit women.
No wonder early Canadians were so fond of calabogus (a drink of spirits and spruce beer) and oyster saloons, which are just what they sound like. It was an exhausting country.
Lest the dictionary be accused of maplewashing (to mask over the country’s problems in a gloss of patriotism) there are plenty of entries that hold up a dark mirror to Canada’s past and present. MMIWG (missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls), starlight tour (the police practice of leaving Indigenous people on the outskirts of town without shelter) and settler-colonial violence are all newly added Canadianisms.
'Elbows up' is one of the new additions to the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles.Darren Calabrese/Reuters
Some first-edition entries have not aged well, such as the dozens that include the word Indian, and a note on the website warns that definitions “may contain outdated or offensive information.” The Canadian origins of renoviction and skid row, meanwhile, reflect our massively distorted housing market and persistent social inequality.
More benign markers of national identity abound in the dictionary as well. Joe Clark once defined Canada as a community of communities, and a rich array of regionalisms show there is no one way to speak Canadian. A bunny hug is what folks in Saskatchewan call hoodies, away is where Atlantic Canadians consider that everyone else is from, and a rig pig is someone who works in the Alberta oil fields. Skoden (a compression of “let’s go, then”) originated in Indigenous communities; autoroute and depanneur are loaned from French.
The fourth edition will probably need to include more borrowed words from immigrant languages increasingly common in big cities. Other Canadians will notice their own omissions. (No donnybrook?)
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But if Canadians are defined by our diversity, we’re also defined by our differences from the U.S., and the dictionary reflects that. There are no fewer than 20 entries for Yankee and its variations (Yankee war, Yankee shave), while some of our proudest lingo is distinguished by the fact that Americans don’t or barely use it, including, apparently, brown bread, fire hall, frosh week, chirp (in the sense of taunt) and keener. And Canadians were apparently the first to say trick-or-treat, thank you very much.
For decades, linguists have fretted about the “Americanization” of Canadian English, and McGill University professor Charles Boberg used to push back, noting that it was only one kind of change affecting the north-of-49 language variant.
But his recent research has shown “significant slippage” in the use of several stalwart Canadianisms, with eavestrough, bank machine, scribbler and bachelor apartment all gradually being replaced by their American equivalents (gutter, ATM, notebook and studio), especially among the young.
“I think it’s almost inevitable with the rise of the internet,” Prof. Boberg said. “It’s a tremendously strong channel from a country that’s 10 times as big as us with infinitely more cultural influence and no language barrier.”
Stefan Dollinger, the dictionary’s editor-in-chief, is in no mood for despair. The University of British Columbia linguist insists that Canadian English is a component of our national identity – “you just have to look a little closer.”
He gets positively excited when an expression whose Canadianness has been “flying under the radar” finally comes to his attention, such as dinged in the sense of being hit by a surprising expense.
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Born in Austria – where the local standard variety of German is also underappreciated abroad – Mr. Dollinger has the benefit of an outsider’s eye, helping him see the fascination of a vernacular that locals often dismiss.
Ultimately, only Canadians can be counted on to do the work of finding the “Canadian dimension of everyday language,” he said. When the Canadian Oxford Dictionary arrived on the market in the 1990s, it quickly dominated before folding in 2008 and leaving the country without a comprehensive up-to-date resource.
“Canadians got duped a little bit by Oxford University Press,” he said. “Everybody flocked to that old colonial brand.”
It’s more important than ever to take an interest in the fundamentals of our cultural identity, starting with language, Mr. Dollinger argued, especially with U.S. President Donald Trump making threats regarding Canada’s sovereignty.
“That’s what happens if you outsource your essential services. The White House has showed us that you can’t rely on anybody else.”
Give’r, bud.