Canada

Canada is a vast and socially diverse country, so that the emphasis of this entry is on the English-speaking communities, which comprise some 45 percent of the population. In The American Language , Mencken discussed Canadian English under “Dialects,” derived variously from “a continuous flow of immigration from the British Isles” and from “currents of migration from the United States” (1963, 469). Modern Canadian English is generally highly influenced by the cultural dominance of the United States, from which some 345 television channels are beamed. The opening essay of the collection Canadian Writing Today , entitled “Broadcasting and Canadian Culture,” made this concession: “The bitter fact is that most Canadians have formed their taste in entertainment from the most popular American network shows” (Richler, ed., 1970, 31).

The distinguished academic Northrop Frye observed: “The Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed not so much by our famous problem of identity as by some such riddle as ‘Where is here?’” (cited in Atwood 1972, 10). Different authorial voices confront that riddle and express their identity. In general they have retained the bourgeois decencies of earlier English literary models, as is apparent in the major exponents of its literature, such as Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, and Michael Ondaatje. Munro deals subtly with the banalities and frustrations of everyday feminine life, into which crudity only occasionally erupts. In “Gold Man” the poet Elizabeth Brewster articulates the laconic Canadian idiom:

I come from a country
Of slow and diffident words
Of broken rhythms
Of unsaid feelings.
(quoted in Atwood 1972, 180)

Others are more abrasive. Atwood has always tested the margins, but clearly does not see a virtue in obscenity. However, she makes fun of macho idioms, observing “Work by a male writer is often spoken of admiringly as having ‘balls’; ever hear anyone speak admiringly of a work by a woman as having ‘tits’?” (1982, 198). John Herbert’s play Fortune and Men’s Eyes (1967), depicting a homosexual rape in a Canadian reformatory, used an appropriate range crude homosexual slang before it became fashionable. However, the unique publishing scandal involving a Canadian author occurred in 1968, when Mordecai Richler’s satirical and scatological novel Cocksure was banned by W.H. Smith in Britain. Racial exclusivity is pointedly satirized by Earle Birney, whose poem “Anglosaxon Street” uses the ancient alliterating scheme with neat irony:

Here is a ghetto gotten for goyim
O with care denuded of nigger and kike
No coonsmell rankles reeks only cellarrot.
(ll. 5-7)

Although the variety is not as marked by obscenity and profanity as is American English, sexual and scatological terms are used quite freely in everyday discourse. Yet the recent Guide to Canadian English Usage (1997) included no blasphemous or obscene terms, even in the entry on euphemism . Likewise, the symposium Focus on Canada (1993) focused largely on phonetic and regional variations. There was no discussion of taboo or obscene language beyond a passing comment from John Sandiland’s Western Canadian Dictionary and Phrase Book (1913) that taboo expressions were “often avoided” by initials (e.g., B.S. for “bullshit”) and that racist terms are entered without any reference to their derogatory implications (Gregg in Clarke, ed., 1993, 28).

“Two Solitudes” was Hugh MacLennan’s pointed title, now a proverbial observation, of “the nervous coexistence of the two founding cultures: French and English” (cited in Waterston, 1973, 35). The French-speaking population of Quebec is, however, distinctive in its blasphemy, being noted for using religious terms as powerful swearwords. As René Hardy has observed: “The French-speaking Québécois never cease to amaze by the abundant generation of original swearwords, frequently borrowed from the Catholic religion” (author’s translation; 1989, 99). Hardy traces the origins of this attitude to the periods of strict control by the French/Catholic authorities in the past. However, the marked explosion of swearing that has occurred in the past few decades in American English has not had much impact on the Canadian variety. Consequently, euphemistic variants such as freaking and frigging remain more common than the root term fucking .

The principal nickname for a Canadian, especially a French-Canadian, is Canuck , recorded from 1835. It is usually considered derogatory, especially when used by an outsider. The term became an inflammatory turning point in the U.S. 1972 presidential election when it was used in a letter (“we don’t have blacks, but we have Cannocks [sic]”) attributed to an aide of the Democratic senator from Maine, Edmund Muskie (Bernstein and Woodward, All the President’s Men , 1972, 132). The “Canuck letter,” as it came to be known, was published in the New Hampshire Union Leader two weeks prior to the primary election, and the subsequent fallout damaged Muskie’s campaign.