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MANITOBA WORDS - A CELEBRATION
Symbol of Manitoba, Golden Boy,
on display at The Forks after renovation and re-gilding
before being placed back atop the Manitoba Legislature
Although the Manitoba Act of 1870 created the province, its present boundaries were not set until 1912. The fur trade opened the area to European settlement. It had once been included in Rupert's Land, a huge territory granted to the Hudson's Bay Company in 1670. White explorers like Henry Hudson first visited the northern shores of Manitoba in 1619, searching for a northwest passage to the Orient. Instead, they found fur-bearing animals.
The first settlement was Fort York, a trading post, established in 1612. Significant agricultural immigration took another two hundred years, and Lord Selkirk's Red River colony was established in 1812. The First Peoples spoke Cree in the north, along with Sioux and Chipewyan. Saulteaux-speaking First Peoples inhabited part of what became southern Manitoba. Later immigrants included British, French, German-speaking Mennonite farmers, Ukrainians, Poles, Icelanders, and many other ethnic strands.
Manitoba words reflect the pluck and grit of those who homesteaded there.
This courage still beats in the hearts of Manitoba people, as I discovered a few years ago myself.
Two weeks before the Red River crested there one spring I was in Winnipeg, watching one of the most devastating floods in Manitoba history advance towards the city. My hosts had friends with a farm near Emerson on the Manitoba-United States border, so we drove down to help build sandbag dikes around their house and barns. On the highways going south we passed thundering convoys of military vehicles and police checkpoints.
During two days at that farm I heard Manitoba sayings I will never forget. As we lugged and hoisted sandbags into low walls, my friend's friend looked out across one thousand hectares of prairie turned to farmland by the toil of three generations of his family. Most of it was under water. The diking was exhausting and wet. A miserably cold wind made hands and faces raw red. Riffing on the old prairie saw about a dry cold, he gazed across his flooded homeland and said, "At least, it's a dry flood."
All day, as the dike slowly snaked around his house, he kept up this humour, to encourage us and himself. "And if she floods heavy, don't even think about climbing a tree. In this part of Manitoba, it's so flat, a gopher has to kneel down to eat." That farmer's stout heart in the face of emotional and financial loss stuck with me.
His gutsy humour prompted digging up other feisty words and phrases Manitobans have added to Canadian English.
"Bodewash" warmed many an early Manitoba settler. This term for dried buffalo dung used as a fuel was borrowed from the Canadian French of fur trappers where it appeared-at first humorously-as bois de vache 'cow wood' and also in the more refined phrase bois des prairies 'prairie wood.' Buffalo chips or cow chips were both called bodewash, which is a direct Englishing of bois de vache that shows up in the rural Manitoba folk saying "squished flatter 'n a bodewash chip." Anyone who could find the chips of buffalo dung used them, since there was little wood available. Dried cattle burns with a heavy odour, while buffalo chips are relatively odourless and were in plentiful supply before the vast herds were slaughtered.
Ever chaw down on a "jambuster"? That's the unique Winnipeg term for a jelly doughnut. One might consume it at the Peg's famous windy crossroads of Portage and Pain.
After traversing it, folks might raise a glass using an old western drinking toast, "Here's a Ho!" The exhorting word Ho! was used to begin the attack in community buffalo hunts of yore. Sodbusters and stubble-jumpers would toast that way to make sure no one mistook them for a bunch of high-falutin' cigarette dudes (old Prairie slang for a city slicker).
The interjection ho is widespread in Indo-European languages, appearing in Old Scandinavian as a shepherd's call to wandering sheep, in Old French as a command to stop, and in Middle English as an early spelling of whoa, a call to an animal to halt. It was also a common direction, as in westward-ho!
A verb I first heard in a Manitoba kitchen appears in this sentence: Mom came over to help us do down some saskatoons. A saskatoon is a prairie berry. To do down is to make preserves or jam of fruit or to can vegetables for winter use. Many Canadians use the opposite adverbial completion in phrases like "do up some jam."
From turn-of-the-century railroad construction camps came "CPR strawberries," Canadian railway slang for prunes. My own favourite prairie term describes what settlers wore to protect themselves from the relentless blessing of the sun, a big straw hat, or, as they said, a cow's breakfast.
Some Manitoba place names have comic roots in food terms, too. Quite official are the following toponyms from the province's map: Pork and Bean Point, Brownie Bay, Sausage Lake, Weiner Hill, Sauerkraut Point, and in the extreme north of Manitoba, Fudge Lake.
Yes, there's humour and grit in the Manitoba soul, as well as the laughter of survivors. Its echoes ricochet off many a word and phrase that Manitobans can call their own.
© William Gordon Casselman 2007
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