STYLETHREAD -- LET'S TALK SHOP!

Is this true? I was reading an article in our local paper discussing the difference between Canadians and Americans and it said that you don't have butter tarts in the States? Tell me it isn't so! How do you live without butter tarts?

http://www.donogh.com/cooking/comfortd/tarts.shtml

ETA: Here is the entire article. It is actually more about finding words for the Canadian Oxford dictionary.

Speak English?: Chances are, you actually speak Canadian. The words butter tart, poutine and Cheezies are virtually unknown outside our country

Bruce Deachman

CanWest News Service

In northern Ontario, you won't find many cottages. Up there, they call them camps. And you'll relax at neither in Alberta, where we go to the cabin for the weekend.

Yet there are, according to Katherine Barber, at least 2,000 occasions on which Canadians put their regional differences aside, and use words and expressions that folks living in the rest of the world just wouldn't understand.

"Canadians are actually quite unaware of how distinctive their language is, because the words that are so distinctly Canadian seem so ordinary to us," says Barber. "It never occurs to us that other people don't use them."

As editor-in-chief of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, which released its second edition last year, Barber is in a unique position to witness the ebb and flow of a language that too many Canadians believe to be simply a mix of American words and British spelling.

"We have over 2,000 words that are unique to Canada in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary," she says.

"The thing that I find interesting about them is that they're so ordinary. Words like butter tart. There are so many Canadians who don't realize that butter tarts are unique to Canada. Butter tarts, poutine. There are all sorts of foods that are unique to Canada."

Barber points to words such as eavestrough, gravol and cheezies, the latter pair the generic forms of trademarked product names, as examples of words we consider common everywhere, but which are actually virtually unknown outside Canada.

Barber recently gave a speech about Canadian vocabulary, titled Bachelor for Rent: The Things You Never Suspected About Canadian English.

"That riffs on the fact bachelor, to mean a studio apartment, is only used in Canada," she says. "So other English-speakers would be perplexed if they saw signs reading 'Bachelor for Rent' all over the place.

"There are all sorts of things like that that make Canadian English quite distinctive," she adds. "My favourite word is shit disturber. That was a big surprise to learn it's Canadian. It seems unlike our national temperament, so it's a rather intriguing Canadian word. The Britons and the Americans actually call it a shit stirrer, so they have the same notion; they just call it something different."

In many cases, it's the meaning of the word, and not the word itself, that is distinctly Canadian. Collector, when referring to highway collector lanes, is uniquely Canadian.

Before compiling the first edition of the Canadian

Oxford Dictionary, a process that took from 1992 to '98, Barber worked at the University of Ottawa, assembling the as-yet-unpublished Canadian Bilingual Dictionary, a joint effort of the University of Ottawa, University of Montreal and Laval University. She also taught at Ottawa's school of translation.

In creating the Canadian Oxford, Barber and her team of two started with the Concise Oxford Dictionary and began making it Canadian.

"You can't just take a British dictionary and shovel in 2,000 Canadian words," she says. "All dictionaries are a selection of all of the words in the language. You choose ones that your users are going to be coming across and need explaining.

"It's not just the words that are unique to Canada, but there are all sorts of activities that are more important to Canadians than they are to the British," she adds, citing sports such as hockey, curling and figure skating, the terminology for which gets short shrift in British dictionaries.

"There are words that designate Canadian historical realities, like seigneury, for instance. All of the names of the native peoples in Canada have to be included, and they've all gone through various spelling changes in the past 20 years, or even changes in the name. So the people who used to be called the Ojibway are now called the Anishinabe, for instance.

"You have to make sure the flora and fauna are the ones that we have here, and not the ones that they have over in Britain.

"It's all of that; it's not just the words that are unique to Canada. It's reflecting a Canadian reality in the dictionary."

Barber and her staff constantly read Canadian publications, circling words that might merit addition to their database. On planes, she always finds something in En Route magazine.

To qualify for inclusion in the Canadian Oxford, words have to have sufficiently established themselves in the nation's vocabulary -- that they're not, she says, "just a flash in the pan word," and that they're used frequently enough.

"Usually, our cutoff is we need 15 examples from 15 different sources before we consider including the word in the dictionary."

And proprietary words need not apply, at least not until they transcend their original definitions.

So timbits, which is still strictly confined to Tim Hortons, will have to wait a while before it can snuggle in between timber wolf and timbre.

But take heart. "We did add double-double," says Barber. "We knew about it when we did the first (edition), but at that point, it looked like it was only used in Tim Hortons. But between the first and the second, we had evidence, and we surveyed Canadians -- we're terrible eavesdroppers -- and it's obviously not just a Tim Hortons thing anymore."

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Canadian Glossary

All dressed: pizza or burgers with all the toppings

Chesterfield: couch

Deke: a hockey term for faking out an opponent

Dick all: nothing

Double Double: coffee with 2 cream, 2 sugars

Girl Guides: Americans call them Scouts, just like the boys

Housecoat: bath robe

Loonie: nickname of the $1 coin

Parkade: parking garage

Pogey: unemployment insurance

Poutine: French Canadian meal comprised of french fries, preferably fried in lard; topped with gravy and cheese curds

Seat sale: a ticket or fare sale (usually for a plane or bus, but occasionally for an event)

Serviette: napkin

Toboggan: sled

Toonie: nickname of the $2 coin

Tuque: a warm, knit hat

Two-four: a case of 24 beers

Washroom: bathroom