1. Is he stupid? North of the eyebrows, that dude is oatmeal.

2. We won like Wolfe.

• Yeah, some victory. The saying is ironic. We won the battle but our leader died. On September 13, 1759, at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, Major General James Wolfe commanded a British force that attacked the French under Lieutenant General the Marquis de Montcalm. Wolfe’s troops climbed the cliffs below the Plains of Abraham and attacked.

The battle was short and Quebec surrendered a few days later. Both Montcalm and Wolfe died of their wounds. We won like Wolfe and now we can stay calm like Montcalm. Calme comme Montcalm? Ou peut-être non.

3. It’s closer than Canucks to the border.

• The humidity is high; one can “feel” the “thick” air close to one’s skin. Most Canadians live as far south as possible, in a long band of population stretching from ocean to ocean just north of the American border.

4. On est venu au monde pour un petit pain.

• Carmen P. Joynt of Nanaimo emails, “My mother often used this humble phrase, which I disliked immensely. It means ‘we were born for a small loaf of bread’ and implies that we were not born to become very important people.”

5. His cooking was bad enough to give a gopher heartburn.

• Quoted by W.O. Mitchell in one of his early stories, possibly Jake & the Kid, this is a Canadian Prairie original.

6. He’s so ugly that, when they tied him to flotsam in Halifax harbour, even the tide wouldn’t take him out.

7. Stunned as a capelin.

• Gwen MacLennan of Stephenville, Newfoundland, writes, “This phrase was used by a friend of mine, Mr. Sheldon Hynes, when we were both attending the Nova Scotia Community College in Kentville, Nova Scotia. Sheldon is a native of Sop’s Arm, Newfoundland, and is a great quoter of colourful turns of phrase.”

Capelin (traditional Newfoundland spelling is caplin) are small silvery saltwater fish, close relatives of freshwater smelt. A schooling species, capelin come ashore in vast, squiggling masses like smelt and are easily caught from a beach or dock. Thus they earn the reputation of being stupid. On the east coast of North America, capelin appear from Hudson Bay to Nova Scotia but are most abundant around Newfoundland and Labrador.

8. She’s playing hockey with a warped puck.

9. You are so off the island!

• This Canadian high-school slang arises from a moronic television program called Survivor in which a group of unpleasant people bivouacked in a deserted place or put ashore on some deservedly uninhabited island vote who among themselves should each week be cast forth from the group. It was an elimination contest — and I use the first noun in its biological sense too. The last person remaining on the island won prizes, presumably for being the most tribal of the assembled nincompoops.

— saying from by Ray Bélanger, St. John’s, Newfoundland.

10. If mistakes were haystacks, we’d all keep a cow.

• Lachlan Fulton of Saint John reports this saying of a local character from the little lumbertown of Chipman, New Brunswick. A gent named Cogie Drose ran a hotdog cart on Saturdays. Chipman townsfolk going to the movie theatre on Saturday night would buy a hotdog and hear Cogie’s latest sayings. Naturally many of his expressions concerned frankfurters. Cogie always said, “A hotdog feeds the hand that bites it.”

© 2005

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Index of Canadian Word of the Day