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Preface to Casselmania
Go ahead; use toonie to refer to the two-dollar Canadian coin. Just remember that on the sunny isle of Trinidad, tooney or tuney is a slang word for 'vagina.' Sneak a peek at chapter two for details. Return to IndexOr look at the opening chapter on Canadian weather rhymes to discover that the flap of a butterfly's wings in Ontario might change the course of a storm in Nova Scotia a week later! Are Canadians connected or not?
If you've ever watched aspen and poplar trees turn their leaves up before a storm, you'll understand this Ontario weather rhyme from my childhood summer camp in Muskoka: "When poplar shows its underwear, the clouds do rain and thunder bear."
Or probe the validity of this weather jingle from Nova Scotia: "A summer fog for fair, a winter fog for rain, a fact most everywhere, from Canso right to Maine." Return to Index
Do you think Canadians invented that persistent marker of Canadian speech: "eh"? How come English poet Geoffrey Chaucer used it in the form ey in his Canterbury Tales written between A.D. 1387
and 1400? Chaucer used eh? in some of the same ways we do today. Check it out in chapter ten. Read more from my whole chapter in Casselmania about our Canadian eh? here.West coast Canucks have dubbed the Kitsilano area of Vancouver with the playful tag Kitschilano. Halifax is Slackers. Vancouver had the first Skid Row in Canada. A block of Toronto's Bloor Street housing Hungarian restaurants is called The Goulash Archipelago by University of Toronto student customers. Parkdale in Toronto's west end was once known as Perkdale, because the prostitution and street drug trade made Percodan pills a medium of exchange. These and other neighbourhood words pop up in
chapter four. Return to IndexThis book features the inauguration of The Canadian National Museum of Gobbledygook and Bafflegab. Do take the tour to learn about political doublespeak, about how pussyfooting officials in many professions try to hide the truth by coating Canadian English in a rich syrup of unctuous bunk. You don't bring an
apple to the teacher anymore. You transfer a pomaceous comestible to the on-site facilitator of pupil learning. My pet annoyance is a word of bamboozlement entirely Canadian in origin, nordicity, used by no less a master of plain speech than Joe Clark. I take nordicity into the word morgue and apply a
scalpel to its pompous corpus. The autopsy report's at the end of chapter five. Return to IndexFans of broadcaster Vicki Gabereau ought not to miss the chapter about Canadian words of greeting, and the story—the only shaggy dog story in this book—about a canine named Chimo after the common greeting and toast used up north. We Canucks hail one another with a multilingual spritz of salutations: aksunai,
bitaemo, bojo-bojo, the Algonkian nitchie, the Chinook Jargon klahowyah, the Cree-based wachee. They bid you welcome in chapter seven. Return to IndexOn the trans-Canadian toboggan ride of chapter eight, meet words and phrases coined in every province and territory. Have you ever had to put up with a jill-poke? In the jargon of New Brunswick lumbering this noun named a major nuisance for log drivers: a timber pole that had one end stuck in the mud of a
riverbank and the other projecting dangerously out into the current. Jill-poke was also heard in early Maritime lumber camps as a label for anyone in camp who was a "pain-in-the-ass." "Get that drunken jill-poke's face out of the molasses!" It's a nifty, jabby chop and should be resuscitated for use in political invective. I confess to engaging in a tad of invective myself in chapter eight where the word "Atlantica" is offered by some for the silly notion of Maritime union. Prince Edward Island has a vivid synonym for diarrhea, "the flying axehandles." In Ontario, Caribbean English prompts a probe into the origins of "mas." You'll discover what part of Ontario lays claim to "haw-eaters." Manitoba's Bungee language speaks again.
And we toast Winnipeg with the phrase, "Here's a Ho!" We travel down Saskatchewan's "grid roads" to a meditation on the word "prairie" itself, and some of the phrases sprung from it, like "prairie itch," a dermatitis produced by contact with nasty micro-organisms called fresh-water polyps of the genus Hydra
found in prairie potholes, ponds, and ditches. In W. O. Mitchell's Jake and the Kid a character "had the measles and the prairie itch once and the mumps on both sides."Can any word be more Albertan than hoodoo? The word "hoodoo" comes from Africa. Hoodoos are oddly shaped pedestals of earth or pillars of rock that develop through erosion by wind and water, especially in areas where the sedimentary layers alternate between soft and hard material, for example in horizontal strata of shale and sandstone. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, African people of Hausa origin brought with them to their enslavement in the American South a distinct magic practice called hoodoo. The word comes directly from the Hausa language where the verb hu'du'ba means 'to arouse resentment, roduce retribution.' How did a word for African magic get plastered on Alberta rock formations? See chapter eight. Northern words like bruck, catskinner, and cheechako are on parade there as well. In the same area the inquiring scholar will find that shit-disturber and shite-poke are Canadianisms. If you have ever been offended by slang phrases that refer to the derrière of a cooked fowl, namely: deacon's nose, parson's nose, pope's nose, then the final section of chapter eight will assist you in providing the correct technical word in
ornithology for the fleshy protuberance on a bird's butt that supports the tail feathers. Just part of our service, folks. Return to IndexChapter nine concerns brand-names and trademarks like "Horned Toad,"a new beer, "Anti-Flirt" underwear, "Rotting Grape" wine, and "Dead Cow" leather gloves and mitts. What will they try to trademark next? I guess the word "Canada" is safe, eh? Think so? Did you know that at EXPO 86 in Vancouver, British Columbia, during the preparation of our national pavilion on Canadian soil the federal government of Canada was not allowed to use the maple leaf logo and the name Canada until it had humbly applied for permission from the Ace Novelty Company of Seattle, Washington? The good folks at Ace Novelty had been granted exclusive use of the name Canada and the maple leaf logo at the exposition. Now there's word-watching with a vengeance. Interesting, how in specific venues a country might not own the rights to its own name! We chronicle other audacious trademarkings too in chapter nine. Return to Index
Chapter six is the first extensive study of Canadian surnames ever published. Our first and last names have sprung from the tongues of first peoples and hitched rides to Canada from almost every language on earth. English and French predominate, of course. But consider movie star and Canadian Keanu Reeves who
has a given name that is Hawaiian and means 'cool breeze.' Ke-ahe-anu is literally 'the breeze cool.'Eileen "Shania" Twain, the gazillion-CD-selling country-and-western singer-composer, grew up in Timmins as Eileen Twain and got her start singing at Ontario's Deerhurst Inn. Shania was the name of a girl she worked with at the Deerhurst Inn, and, when it came time to confect a show-biz name, she chose Shania (pronounced sha-NYE-a) which is Ojibwa for 'on my way.'
There are many books about family names, but only chapter six of this book explains how some first and many last names work by using surnames important to Canadians. Singer, dancer, theatre director, and choreographer Jeff Hyslop has a name describing where an ancestor lived, in an Old English hæsel-hop
' hazeltree-valley.'Tatanga Mani, the Stoney Indian leader, statesman, and philosopher (1871-1967), born in the Bow River Valley of Alberta, had the English name of George McLean. Tatanga Mani in the Stoney language is literally 'buffalo walking.' Canadian aboriginal actor Graham Greene has a memorable scene in the film Dances With Wolves trying to guess the charade as the Kevin Costner character imitates a buffalo badly. Eventually Greene's character does understand and says,"Tatonka!" which is the related word for 'buffalo' in the language of the Lakota Sioux.
David, are you a mere Dingwall? Or does your surname hark back to a Viking sea raider lustily pounding wooden stakes into a special field where Norse warriors met to vote on which British settlement they would next plunder? There's a fascinating surprise behind almost every surname borne by Canadians. And
even if you don't know the original meaning of your family name, it is still precious, personal, and not to be defiled by coarse lips. I still recall the sting of a taunt by a Grade 5 classmate who called me "Cat's-ass-elman." The same little Torquemada-in- training then tiptoed after me around the recess yard, singsonging "Silly Billy. Silly Billy. Silly Billy." An iced snowball to his protuberant mandibular region caused him to
reconsider singsong as a career.Don't mess with my name. And so say all of us. Names have a ritual sanctity that is made plain at baptism. But there's fun and enlightenment and astonishment galore in the story of Canadian surnames in chapter six of Casselmania and, more extensively in my book What's in a Canadian Name?
The names we inherit at birth are the most personal gifts life offers. Yet how many of us know much at all about the meaning of our last names? Have we asked our mother and father their meanings? Did we question a grandfather or grandmother about the origin of our family names? And, did gramps and grammy get it right? I remember a Canadian family called Griggs who had been convinced by several generations of wise elders that their name meant 'grasshopper' until research showed that Grigg was a Cornish pet name for any man named Gregory, so that Griggs meant 'descendant of a Cornish man named Gregory.'
You'll find Canadian names here from Arabic, Belgian, Czech, Danish, English, French, German, Hebrew, Irish, Italian, Russian, Scottish, Ukrainian, and many other sources. It's the sixth chapter of this book I most enjoyed writing and most want you to read. Return to Index
Had a laugh about anything Canadian lately? I think you will in reading chapter three where I have collected almost five hundred Canadian folk sayings and categorized them by topic in dictionary form. Of a dull knife, eastern Canadians say: "You could ride to Halifax on that blade." Dutch immigrants brought their version of "a girl for every boy" to Canada, now translated as the somewhat sexist "every pot finds its own
cover." From the late nineteenth century is this Canadianism: "All dolled up like a barber's cat." A reader in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, heard this one in the 1940s: "You smell better than a dime whore on nickel uesday." A localism from Prince Edward Island describes a very small crowd: "There were thousands and thousands from Tyne Valley alone." From Three Hills, Alberta, comes: "He's lower than a snake's belly in a
wagon rut."Not all our folk expressions hark back to a rural past, although some of the best do. An ecologist from British Columbia said of a dull companion: "He's got his solar panels on the north side." When an audiophile breaks wind, he might hear: "Not bad for a half-inch woofer." "They eat like gannets" say people on Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia, to describe those who bolt their food whole, as gannets swallow fish whole. An Albertan
outdoors guide, asked how things are going, replies, "Slicker than a brookie!" Brookie is a Canadian diminutive for brook trout. A well-known Canadian hockey star, speaking of his childhood in western Canada, always says, "Poor? Listen, we were so poor that if you didn't wake up in the morning with a hard-on, you had nothing to play with all day." Canadians are adept at sexual folk sayings. "Noisier than inbreeding on a cornhusk mattress." "With him, every night was like hormone day at a mink ranch.""He has a one-track mind, and that's narrow gauge" runs an old Canadian railroader's insult. In Saskatchewan, a storm prompted: "That wind is strong enough to blow the nuts off a gang plough."
A north wind streaming south off Georgian Bay summons the comment: "It's blowin' a gagger." Return to IndexInside, I know you'll find Canadian words and sayings to startle and delight you. Now I've written enough of this prefatory sampling. Am I tired? Well, if my arsehole drags any lower, I'll have to stick it in the cuff of my pants!
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