A new musical opened on Broadway last week, “Come from Away,” about Gander, a small town in Newfoundland that rallied to care for some seven thousand travellers stuck there after their planes were grounded in the aftermath of 9/11. The play celebrates a variety of Canadian habits and customs, of which seemingly compulsive niceness is the main focus. But it also incorporates a wide range of vocabulary specific to Newfoundland or Canada in general, starting with the play’s odd title, a term used in the Atlantic provinces to refer to an outsider.
You won’t find “come from away” or “screech-in”—a mock ceremony depicted in the musical that confers Newfoundland “citizenship,” featuring extreme drunkenness and the osculation of a raw cod—in the Oxford English Dictionary. But the scholarly and scrappy second edition of the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (D.C.H.P.-2), released online last week, includes these and many more examples, common and obscure, of Canadian English.
Canadian English, like other varieties of the language, is decidedly a real entity, despite a certain perception among Americans (and even some Canadians) that it is more or less an exaggerated version of Minnesota speech, peppered with “eh” and a funny way of saying “about.” Canada is a huge country, with many influences, chiefly British English, American English, French, and various native languages. Tracing the patterns of these influences is the job of the historical lexicographer.
The Oxford English Dictionary is the best known of the historical dictionaries; it shows the history of words by giving examples of their use from the (usually) written record. The inclusion of illustrative quotations, instead of just definitions and the like, makes such dictionaries distinctive, and useful, in that they illustrate the actual history of words through these examples. There are historical dictionaries dedicated to specific time periods, such as the Dictionary of Middle English; to specific subjects, such as the Historical Dictionary of Golfing Terms; and to national or regional varieties, such as the Australian National Dictionary, the Dictionary of Prince Edward Island English, and the D.C.H.P.
The original D.C.H.P. was published in 1967, on the Canadian centennial. This new and greatly expanded edition, which took eleven years of work by a team of linguists at the University of British Columbia, under the direction of Stefan Dollinger (an Austrian), appears on the country’s hundred and fiftieth anniversary.
The entry for the stereotypical Canadian term “eh”—not included in the original edition—is almost five thousand words long, discussing its history (it’s first found in British English), its status as a marker of Canadian identity, its main functions (“Confirmational uses, Contesting uses, Pardon eh, and Narrative uses,” further divided into a number of subsenses), and its use in other English-speaking countries. “Hoser” is shown to have been created by the comedians Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas, on “Second City TV,” in 1981. The development of “chesterfield”—once a common Canadianism for a sofa of any sort, but now somewhat moribund—is explored at length. “Toque,” for a close-fitting knitted hat, “one of the most widely known Canadianisms,” is discussed in detail, ending with the dry note that “Today’s common spelling toque with the pronunciation in [u] confuses many non-Canadians.”
The dictionary also includes regionalisms from around the country. A “parkade” is a multilevel parking garage, found chiefly in Alberta and associated with the Hudson Bay department stores. “Bunny hug” is used in Saskatchewan for a hooded sweatshirt. In Quebec, “guichet” is a term for an A.T.M., from a Canadian French word for “counter.” Newfoundland is particularly well represented, thanks to its isolation and to an unusual Irish-dominated settlement history.
Historical dictionaries tend to be very conservative. The Dictionary of American Regional English, a six-volume work devoted to American dialects, has funky-looking maps of the states adjusted to reflect their populations, but in general most projects, even in the online age, limit their modern features to providing better links to their bibliographies. The D.C.H.P.-2, by contrast, uses up-to-date research tools to provide frequency charts for the use of terms in Canada versus in other English-speaking countries, and for each province in Canada, giving a clear picture of a term’s international and regional distribution. In many cases, these patterns are discussed in notes as well.
Similarly, many entries are extended with pictures or even videos, a perfectly obvious notion for any online project, but one that is still unusual for scholarly and even for standard dictionaries. These illustrations can be idiosyncratic; the entry for “all-dressed,” a term denoting a dish served with all possible condiments and a potato-chip flavor based on this, displays a photograph of a very plain-looking bag of potato chips; “garburator,” the Canadian term for a garbage disposal, has a somewhat blurry picture of one in a kitchen sink, with the photo credited to the D.C.H.P.-2’s chief editor. The site itself looks rather basic and old-fashioned; much of the project’s infrastructure was built not by a major Internet company but by undergraduate computer-science majors from the U.B.C. campus. While the design could be improved, the approach saved millions of dollars that other publishers have had to spend to develop their systems.
In a foreword, the professor John Considine—a historian of lexicography and a former editor at the O.E.D., who is now based at the University of Alberta—assesses that D.C.H.P.-2 points “away from the accumulation of specialized words and towards the ordinary lived experience of Canadians.” While there are certainly entries for historical esoterica—a “cant-hook,” used in log-driving, is “a pole having at the lower end a steel device consisting of an arm equipped with a sharp, hooked point which, when the arm is slipped over a log, permits the user to roll, lever, or to otherwise direct the log”—the inclusions of such terms have been minimized, especially in the new edition. The idea is for D.C.H.P.-2 to be accessible to the Canadian public as well as to scholars.
Thus, the dictionary not only includes “double-double,” a coffee with two creams and two sugars, a specialty of the ur-Canadian Tim Hortons coffee shops, but also goes on to discuss the importance of the chain as a marker of national identity. The entry for “two-four,” a case of beer containing twenty-four cans or bottles, likewise refers to this term’s status as an informal identity marker, and quotes Barack Obama cracking a joke about it at a state dinner for Justin Trudeau. It also features a photograph of a case of Molson. Many entries, in addition to the quotations that form the basis of most historical dictionaries, feature extensive discussion, often in more informal language than is typical. The frequent presence of “all-dressed,” otherwise associated with French-speaking provinces, in English-speaking Saskatchewan, is described as “a bit of a mystery,” for example. The “eh” entry uses the sociolinguistic technical term “enregisterment,” but then goes on to explain what this means.
The entries are divided into seven main categories, including terms of explicitly Canadian origin; terms that are culturally significant in Canada (hockey-related terms come to mind); and, curiously, a hundred and thirty-six entries for things that are not Canadian—“hotline,” “brekkie,” “browned off”—included because they are sometimes thought to be. It is a rare dictionary that bothers entering terms that are explicitly outside its remit, but these entries serve the genuinely useful purpose of giving the editors a place to discuss their status as non-Canadianisms. The practice also strikes the American reader as being very polite.