Talking to Canadians!

Today I was contemplating ordering a new dictionary or two for my much-neglected reference collection, and in my research I stumbled upon the Wikipedia article on Canadian English. Fascinating! It was clearly written by one or more people with a serious interest in linguistics, as it does consider the "eh" phenomenon but goes into considerably more depth. My favourite part:

The ending "er" is often added to the end of words:

"Gooder" means a good thing, as in "that's a gooder". "Header" means to leave, as in "we gotta header". "Giver" means to exert allot of effort, as in "to push the truck out of the ditch you'll have to really giver".

Heh. Awesome. I can't say I really use many of these colloquialisms, although I guess I have probably said the phrase "We gotta header" on occasion-- although my inclination would be to write it as "We gotta head 'er." Also I thought about editing this article to note that the present participle form of "giver" is obviously "givering." Anyway.

I don't think I say "eh," but whenever I talk to Americans I suddenly become hyper-aware of the fact that I MAY HAVE said it.

Also: when I visit my parents in Washington state, everyone I talk to sounds like me, to me. I don't notice an accent. And yet people there know I am not from 'round those parts. Also, while I was at an antique store in Monterey a couple weeks ago a guy asked me if I was from England. So clearly accent-awareness varies from one person to the next.

developments

1. I adopted a World Vision foster child in Cambodia. She is very cute. I put a picture of her up on my desk bulletin board, to remind myself that the amount of money I send her village every month is equivalent to what I make working for just over an hour. The world is a screwed-up place sometimes.
2. I thought I had invented the term "T-Ho's" for Tim Horton's but the UrbanDictionary says "Sorry, Jocelyn, you're not as clever as you think you are." Slang-coinage heartbreak! This is just like when that other guy invented the telephone at basically exactly the same time as Alexander Graham Bell but didn't patent it quickly enough and was forgotten by the annals of science.
   
3. Tee hee, annals.
4. Speaking of telephones, I have a home phone now for the first time in several years, and we bought a cordless phone with 3 HANDSETS. 3 handsets, people! To my foster child in Cambodia, this would undoubtedly appear to be an insane level of luxury. However, to us it means we can actually PHONE EACH OTHER FROM DIFFERENT ROOMS IN THE HOUSE.
5. Oh right, also, I'm very enamoured of my new neighbourhood. On Saturday we went exploring a bit and discovered that the Mill Creek Cafe has excellent omelettes and sells bread they bake themselves which I am going to buy some of today, and there is a used bookstore just 'round the corner from my house that had all kinds of interesting things. We met our neighbour on one side and she told us that ours is a "hippie neighbourhood." Bread! Books! Hippies! These are a few of my favourite things. <3 Ritchie
6. When our friend Chris told someone old (his uncle? His grandpa?) who used to be a school teacher/principal we were moving to Ritchie, he (the uncle/grandpa), said that the boys from Ritchie were tough. "They're good boys," he said, "But they're tough." James and I say this to each other on a weekly basis, especially when we see boys wandering around who look like they could be from Ritchie. Also, like the boys from Ritchie, we are good, but tough.
   

The word "awkward" is, itself, awkward.

Incoming transmission

"Command, this is Unit 1, come in."
"Go ahead, Unit 1."
"Reporting that 'Bogey' is a funny word, command."
"Roger that, Unit 1."

State of the language

I move that we eliminate the phrase "balance the checkbook." I have never balanced a checkbook (I have online banking and an Open Office spreadsheet, yo). I don't know anyone who does. I don't really know anyone who pays for stuff with cheques, other than The Dude. Let's find a 21st-century word that means "take care of one's finances." OK? Go!

I heart nerds

Today I learned a bunch of new role-playing and MMO terms. My favourites:

• godmoding - creating unbeatable characters; creating deus ex machina solutions to narrative problems; trying to control the actions of other people's characters. Doesn't this seem like something that would be applicable to real life as well though? As in, "You're not even chairing this meeting, stop godmoding"?
• munchkin - a player who plays what is intended to be a non-competitive game in an aggressively competitive manner. I got excited about this one and emailed it to James. I think his recreational dodgeball team has been playing lots of munchkins lately.
• twink - I've known about this one for awhile, but I didn't know its origin. Wikipedia says, "The term 'Twinkie' was used in Everquest in 1999, where players could acquire a bronze plate armor that could be equipped by lower level characters. The low level characters were completely clad in golden bronze armor with a high armor value but still only had a handful of hitpoints, hence the referral to a 'Hostess Twinkie' - bright golden outside, soft and squishy inside." delicious!
• Also the main role-playing game terms article gives us metagaming - using out-of-character knowledge to solve in-character problems, or to explain in-character behaviour.

see wikipedia's full list.

I did a bunch of work earlier today, but then I disappeared into Wikipedia and have yet to emerge.

Mini-linky Monday!

The National Post reports that in the Southern US, 'Canadian' is being used as a racial slur--a coded way to refer to black people. "Stefan Dollinger, a postdoctoral fellow in linguistics at University of British Columbia and director of the university's Canadian English lab, speculated that the slur reflects a sense of Canadians as the other." This definition appears on the urban dictionary as well.

At work today we created a new term: meta-meeting, a meeting where you plan an upcoming meeting. (My boss got an Outlook meeting request for one and she was fuming about it.) The "meta" part was my contribution, of course.

He = Douglas Coupland, not James

When James and I saw the film version of Douglas Coupland's Souvenir of Canada, he talked about this greeting which the government tried to get everyone to use in the 1970s, which I think was an Inuit word or something. Like all government-sponsored cultural initiatives (except the CBC?), it was a miserable failure. Anyone? Anyone? I want to find out what this word is, and start USING IT ALL THE TIME.

Ha! Using my mad librarian skills, I found it before I even had time to post this entry. It's "Chimo," which this handy website notes "may be accompanied by a gesture of salutation as well, namely moving the left hand in a circle on the area of the chest over the heart." I like the sound of that. Wikipedia adds, "In 1967, the Government of Canada attempted unsuccessfully to make "Chimo" the national greeting of Canada, akin to "Ciao" in Italy. This was the year of the Canadian Centennial, and the Canadian government was eager to establish a unique national culture. The phrase never caught on."

UNTIL NOW!

Chimo, Internets. Laters.

Keep it light enough to travel

I'm happier than usual tonight--my CSS blessings multiply. I got a ride to the grocery store to buy my usual weird assortment of food: ground chicken, sugar-free Peek Freans (James: "You are 80 years old."), dinosaur fruit snacks, and skim milk. My new Harry Potter book is reserved and pre-paid for, from my local independent bookseller. I get to go on a mini-road-trip to Red Deer this weekend so James can get his passport application signed by the only judge we know. (Long story.) I got to dig out the ole MLA handbook tonight for the first time in months. There are lots of things to feel happy about--just set the bar low.

Sometimes it's like Alberto Manguel is reading my mind:

Every library suffers from this urge to increase in order to pacify our literary ghosts, 'the ancient dead who rise from books to speak to us' (as Seneca described them in the first century A.D.), to branch out and bloat until, on some inconceivable last day, it will include every volume ever written on every subject imaginable. (The Library At Night, 86)

I am having one of those days where I am frustrated by being unable to read everything, simultaneously, but I shall have to settle for The Library At Night, Dave Eggers' How We Are Hungry, and beginning on the weekend, the penultimate Harry Potter. And I mean 'penultimate' in the incorrect sense that it usually gets used, in case you were confused by that.

CYOA; new words.

Flickr photoset: The Mission Stencil Story, a choose-your-own adventure story graffiti-ed on the streets of San Francisco. "The mission stencil story is an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure story that takes place on the sidewalks of the Mission district in San Francisco. It is told in a new medium of storytelling that uses spraypainted stencils connected to each other by arrows. The streetscape is used as sort of an illustration to accompany each piece of text."

New words for the 07 Mirriam-Webster include "ginormous," "smackdown," "speed dating," and (be still my librarian heart!) "gray literature."

"Le sigh"

A common catch phrase used in the popular classic cartoon "Pepe Le Pew" of Looney Tunes. The cartoon would feature a skunk inevitably falling for a cat who always seemed to get a strip of white pants on her otherwise completely black body...giving said feline the appearance of a female skunk... Many little blogging junkies have taken this saying and put it to their own usage to describe the feeling of dejection, apathy, dreaminess, etc. Sadly, most do not know the origin of the phrase. Even so, it is still a quite useful and popular term.
-The Urban Dictionary

That pretty much sums it up.

Post-Riposte

PS. In an earlier entry today, I said "boringest" and "sorrily" in one sentence. And I'm not fixing it. Lexical nazis be damned!

spending all your money on me

So, as everyone knows, I am obsessed with words that end in "-trix," such as navigatrix. Witness this quote from a long time ago:

"The key to being the Navigatrix is to be assertive, as in, 'I am the Navigatrix! I know exactly where we are! We are not lost AT ALL!'" -me, explaining the tao of navigating secondary highways, on our road trip
-a long time ago [well, 2003]

It turns out that navigatrix, while still being a word I made up, is also a real word (to the extent that inclusion in the Urban Dictionary confers word-iness). And it means exactly what I thought it meant! (Normally I get angry when this happens, but the "navigatrix" thing was comforting.) Today I found out a new one: rixatrix. "A scolding or quarrelsome woman; a scold." I owe these linguistic revelations to my friend Dai, who is more tolerant of my whims than the average person, and also owns an impressive number of internet T-shirts.

What Is Stephen Harper Reading? This is a very winsome project in which Canadian writer Yann Martel sends a book to Stephen Harper every two weeks, along with an enthusiastic letter explaining why he should read said book. The first selection is Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych: "Ivan Ilych is an indubitable masterpiece. There is nothing showy here, no vulgarity, no pretence, no falseness, nothing that doesn’t work, not a moment of dullness, yet no cheap rush of plot either. It is the story, simple and utterly compelling, of one man and his ordinary end." This is being done to raise awareness of the need for Canadian federal funding for the arts. I don't expect it will have any impact, but it's still a pleasant notion. If a political action must be futile, it should at least be charming. Yann Martel, I salute you.

I handed in my last assignment of the semester today, but instead of feeling jubilant, as is my right, I feel sort of exhausted and hungry and lost. And displaced. A displaced, almost-done-my-degree, popcorn-shrimp-eating, thinking-of-going-to-sleep person.

A short break from princesses.

Filmmaker Miranda July is releasing a book of stories entitled no one belongs here more than you. Her book website is a somewhat low-budget rendition of Amazon.com, drawn on the top of her kitchen appliances with dry-erase marker. It sounds maybe too high-concept, but it works, I think. Her movie Me and You and Everyone We Know was amazing, and it also inspired me to try (unsuccessfully) to copy her hair. Now that she has written a book, I might try to do that too.

So I am tired enough that I am debating whether I should have a nap. I feel like a nap, but I suspect, in my heart of hearts, that no real benefit lies in that direction. I sleep until 7:30 or 8 every day, leap out of bed, run around for 14 or 15 hours, and then go back to sleep. That is how it has always been. Napping leads to insomnia, which in turn can lead to the heartbreak of grouchiness. Best to just stay here, at my computer, and wait for the end.

I suggest you watch some of the videos by prangstgrup. The ones that involve singing are particularly funny. The whole premise seems like good, clean fun--like something that would go on at boarding school, in the Edwardian era. You know what I'm talking about.

Introducing the new English: funnier, more expressive, and more modern. English 2.

I'm exhausted, Internet. I wish I had plans for today. This lack of structure is damaging my inner cool. I updated my blog... "yet the void won't fill."

Say it with me: LINK BRIGAAAAADE!

Is it just me, or is the interweb getting boringer and boringer? And what's with adding "2.0" to everything? I'm sorry, but I don't think you can make a logo itself "Web 2.0." Anyway, onnnn to the links:

I am going to see the movie Sharkwater tonight, and I really thought I had invented the term "sharkumentary." No such luck.

A blog of photos not taken: unphotographable. I see things all the time that I am too scared or negligent to take pictures of. But to document them... sublime.

It's starting to get to me...

From defective yeti: The cliche rotation project. No one is saying we need to stop using cliches; but let's try to replace some of the old and tired ones with new ones-- preferably new ones that only kind of make sense!

Example: instead of "back to square one," one submitter suggests, "Back to world 1-1." Hot.

The television show of This American Life is debuting soon on Showtime. Here's the trailer.

“One great use of words is to hide our thoughts." -Voltaire

I know I have linked to wordie in the past, so here is another social site focused around words for your perusal: oneword. The site advises, "don't think, just write." I think the internet has already got the hang of it.