Ian Austen’s NY Times obit starts off in lively fashion:
In Canada, it’s possible to find a man lounging on a chesterfield in his rented bachelor wearing only his gotchies while fortifying his Molson muscle with a jambuster washed down with slugs from a stubby.
But until Oxford University Press hired Katherine Barber as the founding editor of its Canadian dictionary in 1991, there was no authoritative reference work to decode contemporary Canadian words and meanings. (That sentence describes a man on a sofa in a studio apartment wearing only underwear while expanding his beer belly with a jelly doughnut and a squat brown beer bottle.)
Austen goes on to describe Barber’s work on the dictionary:
Before Ms. Barber was hired to assemble a team to create the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, there had been no research-based attempt at codifying the country’s form of the English language to create a general-use dictionary. At that time, Canadian dictionaries were minimally adapted versions of American or British texts.
The group consulted dictionaries of regional Canadian dialects as well as specialized dictionaries like “A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles,” a scholarly collection published in 1967 that traced Canadian English back to its origins but did not include Canadian pronunciations, Canadian spellings of words common to most varieties of English, or many words that were then contemporary.
To hunt for Canadian entries and the distinct Canadian meanings of words, Ms. Barber partly relied on a technique long used by Oxford. She assembled a small army of freelance “readers,” who pored over catalogs, newspapers, magazines and almost anything else they could find for distinctive Canadian words. Ms. Barber always traveled with a notebook to record words on posters and signs that struck her as possibly Canadian. […]
Ms. Barber also adopted another technique that proved useful. She effectively started the dictionary’s book tour years before it was published by getting herself interviewed, often on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio programs, to discuss Canadian English. She used that airtime to ask listeners to send in words. She discovered “jambusters,” which is mostly used in Manitoba and northwestern Ontario, by asking radio listeners what they called jelly doughnuts.
Her witty conversations became so popular that she eventually gained a regular time slot on the CBC as the “Word Lady.” […]
Several entries that made the final cut involved words used in most of Canada — like “eavestrough,” for rain gutter, and “keener,” “a person, esp. a student, who is extremely eager, zealous or enthusiastic.” But others were regional, like “parkade,” a Western Canadian term for parking garage, and “steamie,” a steamed hot dog in Quebec. […]
When the Oxford Canadian Dictionary appeared in 1998 — it was based on a revised version of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary — it was an immediate best seller, and Ms. Barber expanded her long-running book tour.
Because she did not drive, she called on friends and family members to take her to public speaking events laden with boxes of dictionaries to sell. The dictionary, and a 2004 edition that added about 200 more Canadianisms, became the standard word authority for Canadian news organizations and schools. Several spinoff versions were produced, including one for students.
“When the dictionary came out,” Mr. Sinkins said, “for some people it established for the first time that there was such a thing as a unique variety of English we can call Canadian.” […]
The Canadian Oxford Dictionary was a great success and remains in print. But the digital technologies that helped create it ultimately undermined its business model, as sales of print editions declined. The Canadian dictionary office was closed, and its staff members, including Ms. Barber, were laid off in 2008.
She continued to lecture and give interviews about words, and she maintained a blog about language until weeks before her death.
I’m sorry I didn’t know about the blog, which I would have been happy to promote (check it out, it’s good reading). I’ll end with a quote from a comment Q. Pheevr made here in 2007:
I’ve heard Barber on the radio a few times, and in person once. From what I know of her sense of humour, I can easily imagine her saying something like “We lexicographers just feel there are too damn many words in the language” in jest (the more words there are, the more work she has to do), and relying on her audience to be, unlike Brown, clever enough to realize she wasn’t serious.
(Thanks, Eric!)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_and_Doug_McKenzie
In the photo we observe two hosers wearing toques and brandishing stubbies.
Like many Yanks, I got my first impression of Canadians from “Great White North.”
From the NY Times:
This sounds like the NYT writer didn’t recognize eavestrough as a word that is, or at least was, also used in the US regionally. (I don’t know it myself, although I think I recognize rainspout.) Jan Freeman spotted eaves troughs in 2010 in the comic strip “For Better or for Worse”, which is set in Canada, and remembered it from her childhood in Ohio:
The DARE entry has no attestations past 1973, but they did an online and telephone survey in Wisconsin in 2013-2014, asked the question “What hangs below the edge of the roof to carry off rainwater?” again, and got a persistent minority of eaves trough answers. Freeman’s blog also drew commenters from Michigan, Wisconsin, Washington state, and Canada who remembered eaves trough and even still used it.
Is there any difference in referent, however subtle, between “chesterfield” as meaning a sort of sofa and “davenport” as meaning a sort of sofa? The latter seems to have been a regionalism only in Canada-adjacent parts of the U.S. (my Minnesotan paternal grandmother used it), so it’s weird for the Canadians to have a different regionalism for the same referent that’s nonetheless conceptually similar because a repurposed surname for some contingent historical reason. (I have myself owned/worn a fairly fancy/formal overcoat in the style known as “chesterfield.”).
The person to ask about chesterfields is Katherine Barber, of course, and she has answered the question:
One of the comments: “As a boy I always thought the word ‘sofa’ was some strange eastern European thing because that was the word used by the polish immigrant family two doors down. I still use ‘chesterfield’ but often translate it to ‘couch’ like one might when quoting the temperature in Celsius to an American.”
Davenport used to be more widespread than just Canada-adjacent parts of the US, as of the DARE surveys in 1965-70; they labeled it “widespread, but less freq South, South Midland, North Atlantic”, with at least one dot in every single state on the map except Nevada, though densest around the Great Lakes. Since then, it’s lost a lot of ground. Bert Vaux has it in his early-2000s heatmap and his later Cambridge Survey — unfortunately that last one doesn’t seem to have an option to display only the “davenport” dots, but they do seem to be a few of them thinly scattered even as far from Canada as Utah and Tennessee.
Chesterfield originated in England, while davenport originates from A.H. Davenport and Company of Massachusetts; I don’t know if they did any business in Canada, but if they didn’t, that would explain the split.
The “davenport” heat map shows significant use in Western Pa. down to Pittsburgh, which is interesting because my aforementioned Minnesota-born-and-raised grandmother moved to Pittsburgh when she was in her early thirties and lived there for the rest of her life. I don’t think of “davenport” as a Pittsburghism because I don’t associate it with the speech of my dad or my uncles on that side, but since Grandma already had three decades or so of Pittsburgh residence by the time I was born it’s certainly possible she picked it up there rather than in Minnesota.
My Iowa-born-and-raised mother used “davenport” (at least some of the time — I don’t remember details).
I assume Davenport, Iowa is just a coincidence.
AHD3 and AHD4 had a regional note on chesterfield, which was sacrificed for space in AHD5, but it’s archived:
Several of the Canadianisms mentioned in the NY Times article were examined in more detail in a survey linked from here on 55 Canadianisms You May Not Know: chesterfield, bachelor, gotch/gotchies (regional within Canada), eavestrough, keener, parkade.
Katherine Barber also covered eavestroughs on her blog in 2015:
But a couple of American commenters remembered it: “I grew up in Michigan and we always said eavestroughs”, “I grew up in South Alabama and we always used ‘eaves trough’ ”. (South Alabama is quite an outlier!)
Eave(s)troughs can be found in Google Books/Hathitrust in England in the 1790s-1810s, even earlier than in the US and Canada — Wiktionary has some quotations. It looks as though it was invented in England, but must have been rare and/or regional, surviving only in the northern colonies while dying out in its homeland. By the end of the 1800s it was so obscure in England that the OED missed it, and only entered it belatedly in the 1972 Supplement, with US and Canadian sources. They have a quote from Moby-Dick, in advice on what should be worn in a storm at sea: a long-tailed coat and a cocked hat, because “the cocks form gable-end eave-troughs.”
Happily, AHD5 kept the regional note at gutter (although it covers only the US, not Canada):
They also have a cross-reference entry for eaves trough: “Northern & Western US See gutter.”
Shortly after this post, Ian Austen wrote a nice followup to the obituary, Gotchies, Gotch, Ginch, Gonch, Ginches, Gitch, Gitchies, Gaunch: Canadians’ Unmentionables (archived):
Gotch is from Ukrainian gači, according to the OED’s entry, added in 2020 in a Canadian batch.
I grew up on the Delmarva Peninsula and “rainspout” does sound familiar although I can’t say it’s in my active vocabulary. But I would have thought it described not the horizontal “trough” along the “eaves,” but the vertical piece of hollow metal via which the water that first drains off the roof into that trough then descends from eaves-level to ground level. This is, I have always assumed, the “waterspout” that the itsy-bitsy spider climbs up in the children’s song before being washed out when the rain comes down. The one next to my garage had icicles sticking out of its bottom the other day, which I broke off (by kicking with my shoe), thereby releasing a bit of a backlog of vertically-stacked cold snowmelt.
I would have thought the same as JWB (and I too have “rainspout” in my passive rather than active vocabulary).
The vertical pipe descending from the gutter is known as the drainpipe in the UK, if I remember correctly, but I have learned to call it the downspout here. I haven’t come across rainspout.
i’m with JWB and hat on “rainspout”, and the troughs along the eaves are “the gutters” to me (i’m not sure i ever heard “eavestrough” growing up in boston – but my parents weren’t new englanders).
I also thought the rainspout was the vertical pipe, but DARE indicates that spout, spouting, rainspout, or rainspouting could also sometimes be answers to “What hangs below the edge of the roof to carry off rain-water?”; this is a separate question from “The pipe that takes the collected rain-water down to the ground or to a storage tank”, although they sometimes have the same answer.
This was based on surveys from 1965-70, and they didn’t find rainspout in Delaware — maybe AHD was really talking about an even older time?
And hey, the itsy-bitsy spider is in the OED! Twice! Under spout, n. (revised 2016):
vertical pipe descending from the gutter is known as the drainpipe in the UK
A vertical descender I’d call a ‘downpipe‘. ‘drainpipe’ includes those, but also transverse/diagonal connections to collect from gutters into a central downpipe, maybe even in-ground runners from the footings out to a sump. Also jeans.
Ngrams claims ‘downpipe’ is more common in BrE than AmE (but a long way behind ‘drainpipe’). ‘rainspout’ rare in either.
I recall drainpipe being used for what I took to be a gutter (only described, not shown: “The guard wasn’t looking because they stuffed him into a drainpipe”) in “The Muppet Musicians of Bremen” from 1972.