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June/July 2001 |
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Words |
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My first experience with the Canadian ‘eh’ (pronounced ‘ay’, as in ‘say’) was not a happy one. This had nothing to do with the expression, and everything to do with the man using it. I had spent a year fostering a relationship with Government and other people in Kenya. Now, I stood on the observation deck at Nairobi Airport waiting for the new Operations Manager to arrive. I stood there with some anxiety, because my boss in Dallas had told me, almost in passing, in a telephone conversation the night before, that he had hand-picked this man for his unique geophysical skills, not for his social graces, and that I might find him a bit rough. As passengers streamed from the plane, I tried to recognise him from the description I’d been given, but no-one seemed to fit, and we were down to the last few stragglers. Then emerged into the Kenyan light, this yellow suit and floral shirt, big cigar in mouth, with a gait, somewhere between swagger and stagger, that clearly came straight from the Business Class bar. I knew with a conviction that matched my horror that our man had arrived. I never did know if his geophysical skills were unique, but his lack of civility certainly was. Within three months, he was on the verge of being deported and the company’s reputation was in tatters. He had a difficult time dealing with people with dark skin, shall we say, and there’s quite of lot of them in Kenya, of course. The piece-de-resistance was becoming angry when told, at a very pucker restaurant, that ‘gentlemen’ were required to wear their jacket while dancing. Our man removed his shirt, put on his jacket and tie, and returned to the dance floor where, when rebuked by a fellow dancer, he had some things to say about that chap’s parentage. That chap turned out to be a Deputy Minister in the Kenyan Government, and he proved quite unamused by the comments. Canadians I have known and worked with since have nothing whatsoever in common with him, save for the ubiquitous use of ‘eh’. Being here in Calgary for a few weeks, I thought it an opportunity to investigate this word further. In that, I am indebted to friends I pestered and Casselmania*, a book about ‘wacky Canadian words and sayings’, by Bill Casselman. ‘Eh’ according to the Oxford English Dictionary is an interjectional interrogative particle – an interjection, for short, derived from the Latin interiectio, meaning ‘something thrown in between’. (By way of interiectio, I’ve been impressed with the attention Canadians pay to words. Today’s Toronto Globe and Mail, for instance, has a column about a linguistic contest in which readers were asked ‘to remove one letter from any familiar non-English expression and define the results’. Some of the answers were very clever.** There is also a column about graffiti as words in the landscape: I worry about you written on a girder by an Ontario lake. There are also several reviews of ‘word paintings’ by Canadian artist Greg Curnoe, including his famous question-call to celebrate the simple everything in life: WHAT IF DAILY LIFE IN CANADA IS BORING? & (though he meant ‘but’) WHAT IF I AM NOT AWARE OF WHAT IS INTERESTING IN MY LIFE TO OTHERS?) The most common use of ‘eh’ is as a sort of spoken question mark at the end of a sentence, seeking agreement from the other party. So we’re meeting at six, eh? In this usage, (final interrogative), it is pronounced with a rising intonation. It is also used in a narrative setting, within a spoken sentence, and is then pronounced with a flat intonation. I have found this less common, and Canadian commentators seem more critical of this use. Casselman refers, for example, to its use ‘ad nauseam in the slovenly speech of the unlettered oaf and shambling halfwit’. He cites famous Canadian lexicographer Walter Avis as saying, with more gentility, that the frequency of use among some Canadians was ‘so high as to pose a threat to communication’. (As such it is akin to the Australian use of ‘yano’, singly or in bewildering union with ‘like’, so that like the way yano it sounds it’s like yano cause for like murder yano.) What surprised me was the spelling as ‘eh’. ‘I’d have spelt it a/y’. I suggested to a Canadian friend. That would be ‘eye’, she explained. But ‘e/h’ is an ‘e’ sound, a short ‘er’, I protested, as in ‘the’. No, that’s ‘u/g/h’, she countered. We are obviously dealing with an ‘e’ as in reign. Must be that vowel shift business we enjoyed so much last month. Canadians certainly identify with the expression, and see it as identifying them. Casselman speculates that the expression is useful to Canadians in distinguishing them from Americans, and may have become so common because of that. A 1959 study of Canadian/American speech differences, reported in the Journal of the Canadian Linguistic Association, that ‘eh’ is ‘so exclusively a Canadian feature that immigration officials use it as an identifying clue’. It doesn’t take long to realise how pervasive here is the contemporary myth that the expression is distinctly Canadian. The expression did not originate in Canada at all, and is not used only in English spoken in Canada. It comes from England and can be traced back to 14th Century Middle English, when it was used as ‘ey’ in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The expression is used extensively in British, American Australian and South African writing, as would be expected from its English origins. Casselman gives numerous examples of the use of ‘eh’ in literature from the past two centuries, including Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, 1847: ‘Who is to look after the horses, eh?’; Ernest Heminway, The Sun Also Rises, 1926 : ‘Didn’t come, eh?’; and Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman, 1949: ‘So this is Brooklyn, eh?’ Going back several centuries, the word was considered slang and lower class in Britian. Jonathan Swift’s Collection of Polite and Ingenious Conversation in 1740 notes that ‘vulgar persons’ who use ‘eh’ will be told by their superiors that ‘hay is for horses’. ‘Eh’ was considered quite rude and vulgar in Britian well into the 20th Century. Eric Partridge’s 1984 Dictionary of Slang gives the British army rebuke: ‘Eh? to me, you offensive little twit; next you’ll be saying ‘balls’ to the Queen. Get over here!’ Regardless of history or literature, it remains clear, to quote Professor Avis again, ‘that ‘eh’ has a remarkably high incidence in the conversation of many Canadians (and) has been pressed into service in contexts where it would be unfamiliar elsewhere’. Casselman describes it as an attempt ‘to involve the person being spoken to’, to invite their agreement. As such, it is the equivalent of the German nicht war? or the Japanese neh? or even the Aussie okay?. I think he becomes a little romantic in describing it as expression of ‘a residual, uniquely Canadian, pioneer bashfulness’ but I understand how he gets there. If only my man in Kenya had been a typical Canadian, eh? Peter Purcell *
Little, Brown and Company, Toronto |