Archives for February 2004

Update. I am happy to report that pf is basically OK (though banged up around the face, minus his Rabelais, and plus a—presumably temporary—stutter) and on his way to Chita; fortunately, he had bought the ticket before his misadventure, and the muggers tossed his passport back to him upon request. You can read my original post in the extended entry below, and get a fuller story on his blog. I must say, he’s dealing with all this a hell of a lot better than I would in his place.

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A column by Stephen Henighan about a subject I’ve always wondered about: how do Canadians spell? Inconsistently, it would seem:

Standard Canadian spelling follows British spelling in many, though not all, cases. (The British drive on “tyres,” use “aluminium” siding and “realise” that they can be sent to “gaol.”) Like other aspects of Canadian culture, our spelling, in spite of its second-hand appearance, is unique. Part of our inheritance is a system for distinguishing between related nouns and verbs. The laminated card that authorizes you to get behind the wheel of a car is a “licence,” but the bar from which you take a cab home is “licensed.” Your son “practises” a sport, but you drive him to “practice.”

My students at the University of Guelph—and even some of my colleagues—are unable to master this system. Many of them write “colour” and “favour” and sometimes “centre,” as a basic declaration of identity, but after that they throw up their hands. Their confusions mirror the inconsistencies of the signs we see around us, where dissonant spellings mingle. Our newspapers offer little guidance. For years Canadian newspapers used U.S. spelling. In the early 1990s the Globe and Mail, in theory, changed to Canadian spelling. Major Southam papers such as the Montreal Gazette switched to an impoverished version of Canadian spelling, adopting “centre” but not “colour”; under Conrad Black’s ownership of Southam, the “-our” forms came into use, though some American spellings (“traveler,” “two-story house”) were retained. Quill & Quire, another editing anomaly, brandishes a house style that juxtaposes the Canadian “offence” with the U.S. “defense.”…

Most younger Canadian writers, even the best ones, spell inconsistently. Michael Redhill, in Fidelity, shuffles between “moulded” and “molded”; Ann-Marie MacDonald, in The Way the Crow Flies, alternates the U.S. “crenelated” with the Canadian “panelled.” While these writers’ lapses are rare, the inconsistencies run rampant in many who are less accomplished. Almost no Canadian writer—not even Leo McKay, Jr., who is a high school teacher in Truro, Nova Scotia, and one of the few Canadian authors who continues to write “snowplough” rather than “snowplow”—can resist the insidious spread of “license” as a noun. Any spelling adopted by high school teachers in Truro, Nova Scotia has become the Canadian standard.

The case of “licence/license” and “practice/practise” shows how inconsistency (also exemplified by hyper-corrections such as a “licenced” bar or an “honourary” consul) is the hallmark of cultural erosion. In the Ottawa Valley village where I grew up, grade four girls from families with modest formal schooling would chant, “‘Ice’ is a noun so when ‘practice’ is a noun you write it with ‘ice.’” This dictum enabled them to disentangle “licence” from “license” and spell “defence” correctly. Such seemingly trivial ditties are the bricks and mortar of a culture…

To state the spelling question in terms of British versus American is to misunderstand it. Canadian writers long ago forged distinctive spelling conventions. The question is why—without any of the passion that swirls around spelling wars in countries like Germany or Romania—these conventions are fraying even as they have been consolidated by the publication of volumes such as the Oxford Canadian Dictionary (1998). My summer reading turned up a “theatre” here, an “odour” there, with other spellings intermittently Americanized; where the authors stumbled, the editors were incapable of picking up the slack. This is not a conscious decision, nor is it trivial: it is evidence in microcosm of a culture that is being forgotten.

(Via wood s lot [01.31.2004].)

Be sure to chase Henighan’s essay down with this little rant by Ronald de Sousa; remember:
HYPOURCANADIAN SPELLING is a CANCEROUS TUMOUR!