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Like railway tracks stretching across the Prairies, Words: Woe & Wonder is branching out. Despite the expansion, our fondness for puns has not lost steam.
Some of the questions we receive about language can be addressed in a few paragraphs, so we've created a new spot on our Web site that showcases our answers.
We're calling it Quick Queries and Comments, For Pete's Sake.
The idea, as well as the name, was inspired by this e-mail:
Hello,
I was listening to Stuart McLean's Vinyl Cafe a while ago and he alluded, in his Peter Gzowski tribute, that Peter once had a debate about whether "railway" or "railroad" is more Canadian. Stuart didn't reveal the result.
I have since looked at my reference books and not found a reasonable answer. The Canadian Oxford Dictionary claims "railway" is Canadian and British while "railroad" is North American. Since Canada fits in with both categories, which one is more ours – the one we imported, or the one created with our southern neighbour? …
Lastly, I had a conversation with an American advertising executive while on a recent trip. He claimed that President Roosevelt had tried to write a purely American dictionary (with words such as "thru" and "nite") but that it failed. Is this true? If so, where can I find information about that dictionary?
Thank you
Brett Tremblay
Toronto
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A complete answer to the letter's second question requires a review of attempts at "spelling reform" in English over the centuries, something that merits an entire essay. The short reply is that in 1906 Theodore Roosevelt tried, but failed, to get the U.S. Government Printing Office to use about 300 "simplified spellings" proposed by a board founded by Andrew Carnegie. Alternatives like "ruf" (for rough) and "det" (for debt) never caught on. A number of books look at this more "thoroly," including "The American Language" by H.L. Mencken, and "Death by Spelling" by David Grambs.
The first question, on the other hand, is a perfect candidate for Quick Queries. The answer is found in the first pull-down menu, under
Railroad vs. Railway.
In one of his last columns for The Globe and Mail, just weeks before his death on Jan. 24, 2002, long-time CBC broadcaster
Peter Gzowski wrote humorously about his love for "Canadian English." The column, entitled Say 'sofa' all you like — I'll always be a 'chesterfield' man, touched on everything from "gotten" being permissible to his strong feelings about "snuck." (In 2001, we received e-mail about the same words, and our responses are now compiled in Quick Queries.)
Many of Gzowski's compatriots at the CBC remember him as "a writer on the radio," caring deeply about the choice of words and the way they were strung together in sentences. Debates over terms like "railway" versus "railroad" mentioned in the above e-mail were often settled by consulting more than one dictionary, and by checking stylebooks. It was the sort of thing that mattered to him, and still makes a difference to many others.
Quick Queries and Comments, For Pete's Sake acknowledges in a small way Gzowski's contribution to writing and editing at the CBC, as well as his reputation for sometimes sliding into salty language when the microphone was off. ("For Pete's Sake" is a "minced oath" – a way of cursing without actually using words that can be dicey in certain company. Like "Jeez" for Jesus, it's believed to be a way of softening "for Christ's sake" or "for God's sake" by picking another heavenly figure – although, as with so much of our language, etymologists are not 100 per cent certain the individual is, indeed, Saint Peter.)
Not all of Gzowski's swearing was muted, of course. In his "chesterfield" column, he called the Canadian term shit disturber "ugly, though at least boasting an exception to our usual passivity." Quick Queries is the sort of feature that might plop down "darn" in one sentence because it has the right feel, and then unabashedly point out that "haystack" used to be called "haycock" until some people decided it was offensive. The very word euphemism, by the way, is Greek for "to speak well of" – an expression that seems appropriate when reflecting on Peter's love for language.
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