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.