Canada-ish not English

102793 original

I’m here from Canada for my first Edinburgh festival, and it’s been quite the eye-opening experience. I’ve learned two really big things.

First, I learned my English is terrible. This is shocking to me, since English is my first and only language; it’s all I have! It’s like Lady Gaga learning she’s bad at looking like a carnival freak. This discovery has been abetted (frankly, forced) by my flatmate, proper Englishman and funny comic Seymour Mace. Knowing that I’m from the ‘colonies’, Seymour has taken pains to enforce the Queen’s English in our flat, as opposed to the distasteful mutt of a language we’re using back in Canada. I’ve learned the correct pronunciation of whilst (turns out that H makes a noise), and that the second I in aluminium is really important. He also told me what a Scouser is, which wasn’t nearly as dirty as I thought. (I’m just saying, if I lived in Liverpool, I’d campaign to change our nickname to something that sounded less like something that involves two people, sixteen pints, and very few morals.)

To any point I make, Seymour says “of course it’s right; we invented it, didn’t we?” This is undercut by his trump card: “It’s called English, not Canadia-ish.” That’s Canada-ish, sir. (I don’t want to be defensive, but we have our own dictionary. Really. It’s the same as the British one, except for the words toque, sweater and poutine, plus the entry for maple syrup is much, much longer.)

The second thing I’ve learned concerns technology. Specifically, in Scotland the washer and dryer is one machine, a technological innovation I hadn’t seen before. In Canada, we are unconstrained by limited space, so we rarely think to combine machines, or make them smaller. The state of the art washer/dryer set in Canada is the size of a Volvo. I suppose when you see the vast expanses of pristine, unused land in Canada, you don’t think “oh, plenty of room for both a washer and a dryer.” But we do.

So Edinburgh has been an eye opening experience for me, a window into Britishness. Or as Seymour would say, “that’s not a word, is it? It’s a window into speaking properly. Tell your countrymen.” Will do, sir.