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Here is the dreaded column with almost no theme or focus. Here are simple words from Canadian history. To permit inclusion of such columns on websites more pregnant with Deep Thought than this humble offering, Beethoven-browed academics have been known to perform feats of intellectual torsion that would daunt Elasto, the Rubber Boy of Borneo, denizen of long-ago freak shows. But any wee alcove of words that holds treasures like “chanting the cock” and “misery fiddle” is well worth opening, I ween. Ween? First I present one prefatory and thus out-of-place footnote about the verb to ween. Yes, yes, ween fell into lamentable desuetude and undeserved obsolescence in the midst of the seventeenth century. To ween is only used today as a self-conscious, semi-satirical archaism. Ween means think, suppose, believe, consider. It is cognate with modern German wähnen ‘to imagine, to believe wrongly.’ But I like ween’s wheedling sound at the end of a sentence, where it implies that the writer can laugh at himself, at his supposititious opinions and at his nebulous notions however nimble. I ween that is all, and so, let us march back into Canadian history.
The Ballard Effect In the year 1990, the Ballard Effect was a gruesome reminder of the play-for-keeps attitude of Canadian stock investors. Harold Ballard was an owner of Maple Leaf Gardens and Toronto’s NHL hockey team. He bad-mouthed his own players whenever they screwed up, thus reducing Maple Leaf players’ morale to a level not found since inhabitants of the black hole of Calcutta were last polled. In the early 1970s Mr. Ballard went to prison for fraud and theft. Among his other enormities, he had once called CBC Radio’s Queen Barbara Frum a... a... “broad” on the program “As It Happens.” Alas, for some earthly transgressions, there can be no heavenly forgiveness. I mean, Ballard had maligned the mother of David Frum! Guards, seize this aged miscreant. Let him who has sinned against the Frum be torn limb from limb. As Ballard lay dying, and dying, and dying, through the winter and spring of 1990, the share price of Maple Leaf Gardens stock shot up every time he seemed near death. This ghoulish rollercoaster of stock prices became known as the Ballard Effect.
Boucan A boucan is a naturally burning bed of surface coal. Certain exposed seams of coal, like lignite, can catch fire due to lightning or a forest fire and then smoulder for decades, perhaps for centuries. In 1909 Agnes Cameron published The New North—Being Some Account of a Woman’s Journey through Canada to the Arctic. She reported encountering boucans in the north that had been smoking continuously since the explorer Alexander Mackenzie spotted them in 1789 and thought them aboriginals’ fires. Boucan’s Surprising Relative The verb boucaner was in continental French by 1546 meaning to dry and smoke meat or fish. French explorers in the Caribbean made forays into the valley of the Amazon River in South America where they met an indigenous people called the Tupi. The French found Tupi who prepared meat and fish in a way new to them, by smoking it over an open fire on a wooden frame or grid which in Tupi was a mboukem. French heard this as boucan. First British colonists in the Caribbean Englished the word boucanier to give buccaneer. In Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe of 1719, the hero even calls himself by the word: “...having been an old Planter at Maryland and a Buccaneer into the bargain.” Meanwhile in Québec, boucaner stayed in the active folk vocabulary and added new meanings. La boucane can mean smoke, steam, or homebrew whiskey. Boucaner = to be smokey, to smoke (food). Hareng boucané is smoked herring. Les lunettes boucanées are sunglasses. When the Acadians were expelled from Nova Scotia, some travelled to Louisiana where Cajun (Acadian) French has boucane as a general word for smoke.
Chanting the Cock Voyageurs picked a fight by chanting the cock, often no doubt simply to alleviate the tedium of long hours of hard paddling in canoes laden with furs. Bristling with machismo, one of these rough men would stand up in the canoe and crow like a rooster. The phrase is a direct translation of voyageur French chantant le coq. The crowing was usually directed at a specific other person. If the cocky challenge was accepted, a bout of stress-relieving fisticuffs followed.
“Canoe Manned by Voyageurs Passing a Waterfall, Ontario” was painted in 1869 by Frances Anne Hopkins. Library and Archives Canada/C-002771. The touch I like is the voyageur near the stern who bends over the starboard gunnel to pluck a waterlily from the quiet stream. Nothing is sweeter in a strong man than a gentle moment.
Droke Droke or drogue or drook is heard in the Maritimes to designate a clump of evergreens, a copse, a thicket, a grove, a bluff. In Nova Scotia lumbering, it also denotes a treed-out area of stumps. In origin, droke is the word ‘draw’ with a fine Gaelic guttural tacked on its end.
Misery Fiddle Misery fiddle is Canadian loggers’ slang for a cross-cut saw, the type with a woman or man on each end. Its use was hard, sweaty work in the pioneer lumbering days of British Columbia, before the invention of power saws. The whing-whang of a deliberately buckled saw can sound like a badly tuned fiddle.
And that is our themeless list of historical terms from Canada. As I trust I have proved, even a verbal foray with no strict focus may display the charm of diversity.
Copyright © 2008 William Gordon Casselman
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boucaner meant to smoke meat in this way. Then the verb developed the meaning by 1670, particularly on Santo Domingo, of hunting wild cows to provide meat to be smoked. By extension, the verb came to mean to hunt on the sea for booty, as a pirate or boucanier. Opposite is an early French explorer's sketch of Caribbean natives smoking fish. 
