Canada might have been Efisga! Okay, all you Canucks, sing together now: “O Efisga, our home and native land!” Canada was not the only name our forebears considered when in 1865 they began thinking about a name for the dominion which they wanted to make out of the provinces of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick .
As W. B. Hamilton points out in The MacMillan Book of Canadian Place Names, we should be glad they chose Canada, and not
Mesopelagia (Greek, land between the seas)
Vesperia (Latin, land of the evening star)
Ursalia (Latin, place of bears)
Borealia (Latin, northern place)
Cabotia (after explorer John Cabot)
Tuponia (acronym for The United Provinces of North America )
Colonia (Yeccchhh!)
Hochelaga (Iroquoian village on the site of present-day Montreal)
The hideous tongue-twister, Albionora, was given a serious chance. Get it? Albion (England) of the Nor-th.
If Ursalia ‘land of bears’ had been chosen instead of Canada, just think! The RCMP would be the RUMP, the Royal Ursalian Mounted Police!
Woodcut by Jost Amman circa 1580, 'A Bear Playing a Bagpipe'
What about Efisga? A revolting acronym based on the first letters of England, France, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, and Aboriginal lands.
Canada’s best writer about Canadian place names is Alan Rayburn. In his excellent book Naming Canada: Stories about Place Names from Canadian Geographic (University of Toronto Press, 1994), Mr. Rayburn unearthed this delightful tidbit:
“When Thomas D’Arcy McGee addressed the Legislative Assembly on 9 February 1865 on the subject of the proposed union, he noted such suggestions as Tuponia and Hochelaga, and remarked whimsically: “Now I would ask any Hon. Member of the House how he would feel if he woke up some fine morning and found himself, instead of a Canadian, a Tuponian or a Hochelagander?”
I myself DID arise one morning with a noticeable Tuponian, but minor surgery performed later that day corrected it wonderfully. I’m a sentimental cuss however and half-Scots and so possess that Tuponian to this day, preserved in formaldehyde in a pickle jar on my bedroom dresser.
Let us pause to celebrate the defeat of those pillars of colonial Albion who were quashed in their bid to christen us British North America. Finally in 1867, after a flurry of parliamentary gobbledy-squabble, our elected betters picked the old and the familiar, Canada. It first appeared in the writings of Jacques Cartier in 1534. As Cartier excitedly pointed at the native village of Stadacona and kept asking through interpreters what it was called, the guide kept saying, “It’s a village, dummy.” In many Iroquoian languages, kanata means village or community.
As depicted in the exquisite artistic rendering above, the official version of the denominative moment in our national life states that two young aboriginal youths told Jacques Cartier in 1535 about a route to kanata . The lads were referring to the village of Stadacona; kanata was simply the Huron-Iroquois word for ‘village.’ Cartier went on to employ the term as a cover-all, so that it referred not only to Stadacona, the site of present day Quebec City, but also to the entire area controlled by Donnacona, a local chieftain. Soon Canada denoted everything north of the St. Lawrence River.
Over the years keen-eyed aspirants have offered many preposterous etymologies that attempt in a folksy way to explain the origin of the word Canada, like the rumour Spaniards visited our bleak shores earlier than Cartier, found no gold, and wrote on their maps aquì nada ‘there is nothing here.’ In one 16th century Spanish dialect, it could have been aca nada. The early explorer Hennepin said Spaniards, loathing the country, called it Capa di Nada, Cape Nothing.
But even now the word Canada can stir our senses. Remember a man who was first to cross the country and reach Pacific waves. He wrote: “We mixed up some vermillion in melted grease, and inscribed, ‘Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, July 22, 1793 .’ ”
MacKenzie’s achievement recalled in a 1970 commemorative stamp
© copyright Canada Post Corporation
Canadians in slangy parlance are Canucks. Some dictionaries, including the Canadian Oxford English Dictionary, give a lexical shrug, a short pouty sigh, and opine that this nickname for a Canadian is merely a descendant of the country name. “Apparently from Canada ,” sniffs the COD, as if a Canadian etymology were hardly worth the research. Consider the Iroquoian noun kanuchsa, one who lives in a kanata, a village. Apparently the Oxford editors (I like to think of them as the COD pieces) didn’t look long or hard enough. Perhaps this, my modest note, will encourage them? Oops, nearly forgot! In the year 2009, Oxford University Press fired the entire Canadian dictionary staff and abandonned any new Canadian dictionary project. Bad times. Slow sales. We Canadians understand. Once again, Britain politely seems to say to us colonials, My dear persons, I really must insist that you go fuck yourselves. We Canucks do but tug our peasant forelocks, step humbly backward and murmur, Yes, master. As for a Canadian Conservative government headed by semiliterate thugs and yahoos like Stephen Harper and the disloyal malignant Irish dwarf Flaherty, as for such short-sighted, anti-intellectual trash ever proposing a National Canadian Dictionary Project not controlled by foreigners? Perish that thought.
