Anger. Or is that the wrong reason? Either way, it is what drove me to write Organizing Our Marvellous Neighbours.
But let me start out with a bit of personal history. I was always a good speller. On the only occasion I lost a spelling bee in grade school, the word that did me in was beau, ironically enough. One year, we had a weekly writing lesson in which I sat at the front of the class spelling words on demand for my fellow students.
Thirty years have passed, but I still notice spelling. I notice spelling mistakes. Those aren’t always important (perfect spelling in your chat window does not make your instant messages perfect), but spelling mistakes, punctuation errors, and the like will jump right out at me. They’re often the first thing I notice when I look at a page – a phenomenon that carried through to the publication of my first book, where I noticed the mistakes before anything else.
But I’ve noticed other things beyond misspellings. I noticed across-the-board American spellings in Canadian publications – and, much more often, all-British spellings. I noticed those things, but that’s all I did.
The year 2002 would be a turning point. I’d been watching TV captioning for 30 years, but it was in 2002 that CBC agreed to closed-caption 100% of its programming on two networks, CBC Television and Newsworld. That came about as the result of a human-rights complaint that CBC had lost. Suddenly CBC needed a much larger in-house captioning department – much larger than the two women I had met before. One hated her job and the other was keen but not very competent. This is hardly a culture that nurtures exactitude in written language, and lo and behold, the expanded CBC captioning department embarked on a program (“programme”) of captioning Canadian, American, British, Australian, and all other shows with British spelling and British quotation marks. It was in my face every single day.
The slow boil would only overflow after I read a book on new Toronto architecture, Design City Toronto. The writers, Sean Stanwick and Jennifer Flores, are Canadian, as is the photographer, Tom Arban, but the publisher is British (Wiley U.K.). The book was replete with inaccuracies, had nearly unreadable typography, and carried out nonstop cheerleading for the questionable premise that interior design and starchitecture make Toronto notable.
What angered me was the use of British English in a book written by Canadians about Canadian architecture. Here is a real sentence from Design City Toronto, on the topic of Daniel Libeskind’s redesign of the Royal Ontario Museum: “[T]he idea of a fully transparent crystal is slightly misleading, as anodised aluminium will cover 75 per cent of the structure, with the remaining 25 per cent being a random pattern of slices and wedges of transparent glass.”
“Anodised aluminium”? How many Canadians do you know for whom “aluminum” is five syllables? (That would be “al·yoo·minny·um.” There’s an alternate British pronunciation, “a·loo·min·yum.”)
To paraphrase Ustinov, Design City Toronto is a kind of New York copy-edited by the British. And it was the tipping point.
Organizing Our Marvellous Neighbours intends to live up to its subtitle, How to Feel Good About Canadian English. It’s a book that is packed with research and facts that, I hope, will winnow away certain doubts you may have – doubts that Canadian English is real, doubts that Canadian English spellings are real, doubts about what spelling to use. Almost all the time, I’ll be telling you to use the spellings everyone else uses – and that will often be noticeably different from the spellings your computer tells you to use.
The whole purpose of this book is to make it easier for you to read and write on your computer in genuine Canadian English. This book is for the computer user. It’s a guide to help you with every E-mail, every instant message, every text message, every blog post, and every comment on somebody else’s blog post you ever write – and with all the words you ever “process.” It’s a guide to help you with every document you will ever write.
You can also use the advice for the smaller and smaller range of circumstances in which you ever need to write by hand. (That might be a daily occurrence for a schoolteacher, but it’s an ever-rarer scenario for most people.) Still, the whole thrust of the book is computer use. In part, that’s why it is an electronic book.
But before I can help you write Canadian English correctly, I have to persuade you that it even exists in the first place.
Next: This just in: Canada exists →