Here are 1o Canadian sayings and explanations of their meaning in relatively easy English, written for students who are studying English as a second language.

1. Thin? I’ve seen more meat on a hockey stick!

Canadians use this saying if a person is too thin. The long, narrow, wooden stick used to move the puck in a hockey game does not, of course, have any meat on it.

 

2. He is fat as mud.

If a Canadian person is overweight, this saying may be used. This can also mean that he’s ‘healthy, not too scrawny.’ The mud simile is quite old for a Canadian saying. It appears in an 1864 book entitled George Stanley or A Year in the Woods, all about life in early Canada and the English speech of our pioneer settlers.

 

3. He Rode in on an Ugly Horse.

Here’s a cowboy saying from ranch country in the Canadian province of Alberta. It means the person in a bad mood or very grumpy early in the day. An American way of saying the same thing is: “He got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.” Now, neither an ugly horse nor the wrong side of the bed should make a person grumpy. There is no wrong side of most beds. Most horses are good-looking animals. These are merely vivid comments on a foul temper.

 

4. Here is a saying about Canada’s place on the map of North America.

Question: Is it hot and humid?

Answer: It’s closer than Canucks to the border.

This common expression about summer weather refers to a Canadian population fact. Most Canadians live very near the American border, because it is the warmest part of Canada. Canuck is a slangy and playful synonym for Canadian.

Canuck can be an adjective (“Get your Canuck butt off that chair!”= stand up and start to work!) or a noun (“There are two Americans and two Canucks here.”)

 

5. Here is a question-and-answer joke.

Question: What’s the difference between a Canuck and a canoe?

Answer: Sometimes a canoe tips.

This joke depends on two meanings of the English verb “to tip.” When a canoe tips, the boat turns over on its side in the water. When you exit a restaurant, you may leave a tip (money) on the table, to show that there was good service. The joke suggests that Canadians are stingy and don’t leave tips. As a Canadian, I assure you this is only a joke.

 

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6. Here are some French-Canadian lyrics with a wintry turn of phrase.

“Mon pays, ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’hiver.”

Translation: My country, it’s not a country, it’s the winter.

If there is one line of French every new Canadian should learn, it is this first line of Quebec’s best-loved modern song. In 1965 chansonnier Gilles Vigneault penned what has become an unofficial anthem of Quebec, “Mon Pays,” (“My Country”) a song whose opening lyric speaks to all Canadians who are not Florida-nesting snowbirds. Although a sentimental favourite, the lyrics of the song are actually a bleak howl of despair. Everywhere the singer looks to find identity and warmth, he instead encounters an obliterating and cold nature. A garden is not a garden, but a bare plain. A road is not a road, it’s a ghastly blank of snow. Indifferent, monstrous nature, waiting dressed in winter white to devour the puny human pioneer, is a constant through much Canadian literature, as Margaret Atwood pointed out in Survival, her 1972 critical appraisal of this theme in our novels and poetry.

 

7. There’s no trailer hitch on a hearse.

It means you can’t take anything with you after death. So enjoy earthly pleasures now. I received this gem from correspondent Tim Gompf, who lives near Oak Lake in Manitoba.

 

8. Saskatchewan is so flat that you can watch your dog run away for a week.

Saskatchewan is one of our prairie provinces, parts of which are very flat. There are few trees in some parts of the province. So, if your dog began to run away, you could watch his running for a very long time.

 

9. Vite sur ses patins.

This saying in Quebec French means she is ‘quick on her skates.’

It usually means ‘she is clever’ as in quick-witted. But it may also refer to the actual physical speed of an energetic person.

 

10. I am going to feed you a shut-up sandwich.

This saying belongs to a category called “mock threats.” Mock threats only pretend to be bullying and violent. In order to stop a person talking, to shut them up, you might hit them in the mouth. Just as you put a sandwich into your mouth to chew and swallow such food, so you might smash your fist into someone’s mouth, or, feed them a shut-up sandwich.

 

ESL teachers should consider Canadian folk sayings as a potential part of ESL pedagogy.

There is humour, of course, in folk sayings. But, in the collected wisdom of folk speech, there are pathways to the very heart of a people's language. Although folk sayings are expressed in simple English, nevertheless the complexity of the semantic and cultural content of a saying's humour sometimes prevents beginners and early English-learners from "getting the joke" or the cultural reference.

Some effort on ESL teachers' parts to incorporate the folk saying as a learning module for ESL English may be worth consideration. My books abound with the comic and serious content of Canadian folk sayings fully explained. The linguistic, cultural and social content of sayings, once explicated, permits Canadian folk proverbs and sayings to be used to introduce the newcomer to Canadian lifeways not always depicted in sociology texts or even in civics classes for New Canadians.

 

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Folk sayings are an “up-close” encounter with the real way that Canadians speak.

True Canuck talk is the way to introduce Canada to a person learning Canadian English. Formal speech is often necessary for work. But what is usually missing from a newcomer’s way of speaking a new language? Missing are idiomatic turns of phrase, the little bits of street talk and folk wisdom that make Canadian speech distinctive from British and from American talk. These "genuine" Canadianisms help new speakers "fit in" more comfortably in their first Canadian conversations.

The everyday idioms both of language and of lifestyle are conveyed in folk speech. Is this a mode worth attempting for teachers of English as a Second Language? Perusal of my three volumes of Canadian folk sayings will answer that question in the affirmative.

 

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© 2007 William Gordon Casselman