Eh? The True Story of an Interjection
Imagine this statement by a gentleman of the Canadian persuasion fresh from a psychiatrist’s office:
“So I go to this shrink, eh, and he goes like I don’t have no confidence, eh? I go, ‘No way, man.’ He goes I should take assertiveness training. Weird, eh? Like I’m always supposed to be seeking approval, eh, from, you know, other people? I felt like he could kiss my Royal Canadian, eh? But, sayin’ it woulda been too pushy. Dyuh think?”
Eh comes in two basic flavours, two broad categories of usage: final interrogative eh? with a rising intonation, and narrative eh with a sustained or flat intonation and found in the midst of spoken Canadian English sentences. Pop culture icons like Bob and Doug Mackenzie, those two hosers on SCTV played in the 1970s to the 1980s by Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas, popularized and used eh? repeatedly as a marker of Canadian speech. The two actors were simply reproducing what they heard in everyday Canadian life. But the popularity of SCTV in the United States also helped some Americans and more Canadians become aware that eh was a characteristic of Canuck talk. Long before the hosers, of course, academics were writing their eh-says too.
Professor Harold B. Allen in “Canadian-American Speech Differences Along the Middle Border” (Journal of the Canadian Linguistic Association, 5 [1959]:20) wrote “Eh?. . .is so exclusively a Canadian feature that immigration officials use it as an identifying clue.”
It is natural that we Canadians share a proprietary need to claim certain speech habits as our own. Differentiating ourselves from Americans is important to our notoriously fragile sense of self. But we cannot go too far and claim eh is exclusively Canadian. Chaucer used it, eh? That’s Geoffrey Chaucer, English poet, author of The Canterbury Tales, written between A.D. 1387 and 1400. Chaucer used Middle English ey? and variants in some of the same ways Canadians still do. The interjection is well over six hundred years old. I know it hurts but, no, three rink rats did not meet in a secret cellar under a hockey arena in Sudbury one night back in the forties after a game and too many brews to coin the evocative particle. Yeah, but only Canadians use it, eh?
Oh, right!
Check out these famous Canadian usages:
“And who is to look after the horses, eh?”
(Emily Bronté, Wuthering Heights, 1847)
“So you think he might be hard on me, eh?”
(Charles Dickens, Bleak House, 1852)
“I suppose you’re a smart fellow, eh?”
(Henry James, The American, 1867)
“Breakfast out here, eh?”
(George Bernard Shaw, Arms and the Man, 1894)
George Bernard Shaw
“Breathe—fresh air. Good, eh?”
(Joseph Conrad, Typhoon, 1903)
“Didn’t come, eh?” “No.”
(Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 1926)
“So this is Brooklyn, eh?”
(Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman, 1949)
“Oh, she’s coming, eh, Ma?”
(Paddy Chayefsky, Marty, 1954)
“Not like some people we know, eh?”
(J. D. Salinger, Zooey, 1957)
“Let this cup pass from you, eh?” “Right.”
(Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960)
“Eh, Nat, ain’t that so?”
(John Fowler, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 1969)
Of course Morley Callaghan, Robertson Davies, Margaret Laurence, Stephen Leacock, W. O. Mitchell, Farley Mowat, Mordecai Richler, and dozens of other Canadian writers use eh as well.
W.O. Mitchell as I remember him when I worked with Bill at CBC Radio in the early 1970s as senior producer of “This Country in the Morning.” W.O. often visited Toronto from his home in High River, Alberta, to share his tales and insights with Canadian radio listeners through chats with Peter Gzowski.
The usage of eh? is widespread. Australian and South African novels contain the interjection. The examples from British and American authors quoted above, which demonstrate many of eh’s categories of usage, were collected by a great Canadian lexicographer, the late Walter S. Avis; and they appear in his definitive article “So eh? is Canadian, eh?” (Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 17, no.2 [1972]: 89-104). It is well worth perusal.
Professor Avis’ view is the scholarly and the commonsensical one and I quote it: “Eh?. . .did not originate in Canada and is not peculiar to the English spoken in Canada . . . On the other hand, there can be no doubt that eh? has a remarkably high incidence in the conversation of many Canadians these days. . . in Canada eh? has been pressed into service in contexts where it would be unfamiliar elsewhere. Finally, it would appear that eh? has gained such recognition among Canadians that it is used consciously and frequently by newspapermen and others in informal articles and reports.”
Earlier in the same study, Avis writes “eh? is a feature Canadians share with Britishers but one which some Americans consider unusual.” Americans say huh? more often than eh?
There is much more on eh? in chapter ten of Casselmania by Bill Casselman.
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