I QUIT

I listen to ABC Radio National’s linguistics program Lingua Franca. A bit dry and academic at times. But I put the kibosh on that last week when hostess Maria Zijlstra interviewed me about Canadian English and Organizing Our Marvellous Neighbours. Three years later, but still.

Speaking of kiboshing, Maria plotzed when I used the word “bupkus.” And Maria was rather interested in Canadian run-on bilingual packaging (“Trademarks and graphic design owned by Procter & Gamble détient les marques et conception graphique”), for which I ginned up a set of Flickr photographs that she probably won’t actually use.

“Bring your purchases to the cash and pay by Interac”

We also had a whole discussion about Canadian-only words and senses like cash and Interac (and debit). (I did not get any points for knowing that the Australian equivalent of Interac is eftpos or EFTPOS.)

Just this morning, in Lynn Coady’s The Antagonist, I found that exact usage of cash to mean variously cashier, cash register, and bank of same.

Kyle was back on his game now, growing more comfortable as we moved toward the cash and the distance grew between us

The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2011.11.21 15:37. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is:
https://blog.fawny.org/2011/11/21/linguafranca-oomn/

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