Katherine Barber, editrix of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, has a mediævalist air (she indeed sings in choirs and loves ballet) and an inexplicable mid-Atlantic accent. She gave a presentation last night on Canadian English.
To concentrate on uniquely-Canadian words is a sort of anecdotalism we wish to avoid (historians face the same problem – everybody’s got a story they like to tell), but here are the Canadianisms Barber introduced last night, some of them with enough citations to have been newly added to her dictionary. (I’ve daggered ones that aren’t in the dictionary.)
- Auditor General
- aunt
- (Maritime pronunciation [a:])
- babiche
- (rawhide webbing)
- bachelor, bach
- (“large bachelor,” “bachelors available”)
- bird flu
- bismarck
- baba
- bomboniere
- butter tart
- (Bruce McCall pardoy of wartime illustration: HE’S FIGHTING FOR YOUR BUTTER TARTS)
- Canadian Tire money
- CanLit
- cash
- (register; also its location)
- conditional sentence
- course calendar
- dangerous offender
- drop the gloves
- eh
- (not distinctly Canadian when used in the Americans’ stereotyped sense of tag question, but as an interrogative like you know, right, you follow: “We were on the 401, eh, and this guy in a Benz cut us off”)
- emerg
- gotch(ies)
- hang up the skates
- Hatter
- (person from Medicine Hat)
- holopchi†
- Iqalungmiut
- (people from Iqaluit, singular and plural)
- jambuster
- LCBO
- loonie
- (headline: “Loonies to help crime victims”)
- mangia-cake
- (what Italian-Canadians call Canadian anglos; possibly the second-best Canadianism ever – see also gino/gina [vs. guido/guida], porkchop [the best!], FOB, CBC)
- midget, atom, mosquito, bantam, peewee
- (also major junior)
- nicky nicky nine doors
- (vs. drop down ginger)
- Nunavummiut
- (people from Nunavut, singular and plural)
- Ontario scholar
- (also grade 13)
- panzerotto
- perogy
- rag the puck
- riding
- scotch and soda†
- shovel, v.
- Smithereen
- (person from Smithers, B.C.)
- Western vs. Denver sandwich
Superspecial addition to the corpus!
After picking away at it off and on for about 18 months, last year I called up the OED here and asked them if they wanted my large corpus of accessibility-related citations, painstakingly retyped from my three linear feet of sources. They took ’em, but that’s the last I heard of it.
Now you too can enjoy the pleasure of backdating closed captioning, Line 21, and the contentious audio description all the way to the go-go ’80s! (Tagged accessible PDF only, whether you like it or not.)