Maple Leaves Paint On The Pave­ment, Byward Mar­ket (Ottawa)

Just like every­thing in Canada, it started with a long harsh win­ter. I was watch­ing T.V when I sud­denly real­ized that my weather vocab­u­lary had expanded quite a lot.

I once heard that Inu­its had a least 20 syn­onyms for the word “snow”. Well, let me tell you, Cana­di­ans win­ter vocab­u­lary is quite rich too.

I used to know hot and cold, rain or shine, but here I was bom­barded with so many ways of say­ing “win­ter sucks”. I was now famil­iar with freez­ing rain, one of the most haz­ardous trav­el­ing con­di­tion. I was wary of the wind­chill, the actual tem­per­a­ture felt on the skin due to the wind. I knew the dif­fer­ent between drift­ing snow and ver­ti­cal wet snow (and which one of the two would be harder to shovel). I cursed the slush, the slurry mix­ture of snow and water, which was dirty­ing the bot­tom of my pants on my way to work. I never for­got my tuque, the knit­ted win­ter hat. I plugged the block heater every morn­ing to be able to start the car. I envied the snow­birds, these retired Cana­di­ans rich enough to spend the win­ter in some warmer place, often South­ern US.

I was speak­ing Canadian.

I started pay­ing atten­tion to other cana­di­anisms, and real­ized I was also speak­ing the local lingo at lunch. Yep.

Unless you guys reli­giously line-up at Tim­mies (the ubiq­ui­tous Tim Hor­tons cof­fee store) for some Tim­bits (left-over dough from a donut) and a double-double (which always means dou­ble cream dou­ble sugar in Canada). I assume you don’t enjoy beaver tails, but­ter tarts or sugar pie, but all of these are really nice patries. Your idea of din­ner may not be Kraft Din­ner (or Crap Din­ner, as we also say), or a nice pou­tine that clogs your arter­ies. And when you need some booze, you don’t head to the LCBO (Liquor Con­trol Board of Ontario), the SAQ (Société des Alcools du Québec) or the Beer Store. Oh, and you may laugh if I tell you I have some homo milk in the fridge.

Eng­lish Cana­di­ans are not shy about bor­row­ing from the French either. You’d think my French helps… it doesn’t. A dépan­neur is a con­ve­nience store here, but in France, it’s a mechanic. I knew fran­coph­one (french-speaking) and anglo­phone (english-speaking), but allo­phone is a Cana­dian inven­tion describ­ing some­one whose mother tongue is nei­ther French nor Eng­lish. A guichet is an ATM machine, not just any counter or ticket office like in France.

A dif­fer­ent kind of French, I’m telling you.

You’d bet­ter speak Cana­dian as well if you want to under­stand pol­i­tics and most of what hap­pens on the Hill (Par­lia­ment Hill in Ottawa). Who would you vote for oth­er­wise? The Tories (Con­ser­v­a­tive party)? The Grits (Lib­eral party)? The Péquistes (Parti Québé­cois)? The Blo­quistes (Bloc Québé­cois)? Well, if you don’t under­stand pol­i­tics, you can still take pic­tures of the moun­ties. Every­body love them.

Liv­ing in the national cap­i­tal also teaches you the proper use of — bilin­gual — acronyms. CIC, CBSA/ ASFC, CRA/ ARC, CSPS/ EFPC, FAC/ AEC, HC/ SC, HRSDC… we can even locate all these min­istries on the map. But hey, this is Ottawa, we are a bit weird.

Even when shop­ping, you must know what a toonie (a two dol­lars coin) and a loonie (a one dol­lar coin) are and how to cal­cu­late the GST and the PST.

And don’t let me for­get about our favorite inter­jec­tion…eh. Eh shows con­tin­ued inter­ested: “it’s cold eh, I drove this morn­ing”. It can also be used to turn a sen­tence into a ques­tion: “fuck­ing cold, eh?”. Or even to show agree­ment: “I know, eh.”

But remem­ber that any Amer­i­can mock­ing us say “eh” more often than we do.

And that, for the record, the last let­ter of the alpha­bet is “zed”, not “zee”.

Related arti­cles:

1. Do You Speak English?
2. 10 Clues I Became Canadian
3. From Laowai To Canadian
4. Ten Price­less Cana­dian Experiences
5. Seven (Cana­dian Win­ter) Facts