These and 980 other fun sayings

appear in my book,

Canadian Sayings 2.

1. It’s hotter than a two-dollar pistol.

The days of cheap revolvers—like the “Saturday Night special” referred to in this saying are not gone, as urban murder statistics constantly remind us.

2. Lady in a Bar: “Never went to bed with an ugly man. Woke up with a few though.”

3. How nasty was he? He has to sneak up on a glass of milk or he’d sour it.

4. A hot July makes for a fat churchyard.

In days of yore, old sick people often succumbed to a severe summer heat wave.

5. Don’t judge bannock before it’s fried.

This translation from the Ojibwa language mentions a true staple of pioneer Canadian food.

To the first Canadian settlers of the eastern seaboard, bannock was an unleavened quick bread, its dough made of flour, lard, salt and water, done over an outdoor fire in a frying pan if one was on the trail, or at home, pan-fried on a slow hearth. Most outdoor cooks suggest that leaving the bannock dough over warm embers rather than over a roaring campfire prevents the spectacle of unhappy campers chawing away at burnt-black bannock.

This rough bread is remembered in the town of Bannock, Saskatchewan.

Bannock was also called trail biscuit, bush bread, river cake, and galette.

Manitoba’s “Red River bannock” differed from true Scottish bannock because wheat flour eventually replaced oatmeal in the recipe. The Red River settlers’ original recipe had no leavening agent and was a hard flour-and-water biscuit cooked in an exterior brick or mud oven or on a hearth. Where the Scottish recipe might call for beef drippings, later Canadian prairie bannock was likely to use buffalo fat, if available.

Bannock could be leavened too, if the cook had sourdough starter, yeast, baking powder or baking soda.

The word is Scots Gaelic, bannach, for a thin oatmeal cake, ultimately from an Old English word bannuc ‘morsel, little bit.’ As to the taste of the original oatmeal bannock, it is perhaps best to recall Dr. Samuel Johnson’s definition in his famous dictionary (1755) “Oats, n. a grain which in England is fed to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.”

6. How angry did you get? I was chewing nails and farting tacks.

7. Rattlesnakes are so big on the Bruce Peninsula , they don’t have rattles; they have little bells that play “Nearer My God to Thee.”

The timid little rattler of the Bruce is totally misrepresented by this folk saying.

This exaggerated and spurious welcome was given to first-time cottagers on the day they moved into their Bruce Peninsula hideaway. Central Ontario’s Bruce Peninsula is the part of the Niagara Escarpment that separates Lake Huron from Georgian Bay.

A venomous and endangered pygmy rattlesnake, the Massasauga, Sistrurus catenatus, lives on the Bruce. The Massasauga likes moist habitat where it feeds on mice and frogs.

Its zoological name does ring a bell for those who have studied Latin, Greek, or the music of ancient Egypt. The genus name means “sistrum-tailed.” Sistrum is a Roman version of the Greek word seistron ‘shaker.’ The same Greek verbal root seis- appears in our shaky English adjective seismic. The Greek word for the tail of an animal is oura and it shows up here in a Latinized suffixal form -urus; hence sistr- + -urus = sistrurus ‘sistrum-tailed.’

When ancient Greeks traveling in Egypt saw priests chanting a hymn to some cow-headed goddess of the sands, they stopped, intrigued by clinking noises of a small musical object that a priest (or temple maiden as in the illustration at the left) held in one hand and gently struck against the other hand at caesuras in the rhythm of the religious chant. This musical percussion instrument called a sistrum was shaken on the beat to emphasize the beat, to facilitate religious choreography: “Hey, dude, Ra wants you to boogie like a crocodile! Keep dancing like that and you’ll lay ’em in the Niles. The Blue and the White Nile, that is.”

The sistrum was a metal frame shaped like an upended capital U. Thin metal disks perforated by transverse rods fixed to the U-frame hung together in rows and jingle-jangled when the sistrum was struck. Other sistra had chains of tinkling, silvery-sounding small beads or metal pieces hanging down from the transverse rods.

Picture a rattlesnake tail and you will see how apt a genus name Sistrurus is.

The specific adjective is nifty too; catenatus in Latin means ‘in a row like links in a chain.’ So the zoological name describes the little animal’s most vivid feature: a linked row of rattles for a tail. Massasauga is an Ojibwa river name and means literally ‘water great mouth,’ and refers to an early siting of the snake, perhaps on a wet or marshy bank of the Mississauga River in southern Ontario. A once large tribe of the Ojibwa people also bears the name Mississauga after the river mouth that was the centre of their territory.

8. Been there. Done that. Got that maple-leaf T-shirt.

9. I’ve seen live bait smarter than him.

10. Vite sur ses patins. Literally ‘quick on her skates,’ that is, clever in Québec.

11. Hey, pardner, this isn’t my first Stampede.

(In other words, I’m not naïve. I’ve been to Calgary twice.)

12. How stupid is he? If you pick him up and put your ear to his ear, you can hear the sea.

13. Never mind about the rain. You’ll be safe. Shit floats.

14. It’s hot enough to singe the bristles off a hog’s back.

15. La rivière est tellement croche que les poissons ont      des pentures.

‘The river’s so winding, the fish have hinges.’

16. Hard summer work: Busier than a one-eyed cat       watching nine rat holes.

17. The chances are slim and none, and slim is visiting       Alberta.

18. Threat: I’m gonna feed you a shut-up sandwich.

(A punch in the mouth is on the way.)

19. He ain’t all coupled up.

This is prairie railroad slang for one who’s “a tetch off.” The railway cars in his train of thought are not  connected. In fact, his train of thought may be derailed permanently.

20. Done a lot of travel? Hell, boy, I’ve been about as far as salt water wants to go.

      This was an old sailor’s modest estimate of his       seafaring excursions.

All of the sayings above and 980 more zingers await the reader of

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Index of Canadian Word of the Day

 

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