Canada or U.S., everyone By Jennifer Harrison

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Every year, my family travels down from Ontario to California in search of a little sun and relaxation. Palm Desert is a beautiful, sweltering oasis with lots of palm trees, golf courses, mountains and fantastic gardens.

It is famous for the La Quinta resort, where Hollywood stars have hidden away since the '20s. When we visited, Andre Agassi and Barbara Bush were wandering around in the sun and amongst the flowers. World-class tennis facilities and huge shopping malls are also a big attraction, and being only two hours from Los Angeles.

We have always found California to be packed full of tourists from every nation, and we usually bump into Canadians on our travels. People from overseas are noticeable for their loud, boisterous conversation, or their remarkable fashions, but we discovered that Canadians are a real novelty to Californians.

It appears that Canadians and Americans are very similar in the eyes of the world in so far as appearance goes, but every hot-blooded Canadian knows that it would be terrible to be walking around having people thinking you were American.

When Canadians travel, it is common to see us feverishly sewing miniature Canadian flags to our luggage. While you might think that this is for easy identification, it is actually so that we are not mistaken as Americans. In my opinion, the flag trick is an unnecessary step to take.

This is because we Canadians already distinguish ourselves from our neighbors to the south by one very common, very small word that is absent from American speech but makes up a large part of a Canadian conversation. This is what seems to fascinate Californians.

At a restaurant we visited in Palm Desert last year, the waiter noticed our whiter-than-white complexions (much different from the copper tans of native Californians) and asked us where we were from. My dad proudly announced "Toronto, Canada." The waiter's expression suddenly became an obnoxious grin and he said in a weird British drawl, putting obvious emphasis on the word "eh," "Yah, you're from Canada, eh?"

Yes, it's true, Canadians are noted in the United States for not much more than our love of this one tiny word that usually accompanies a question or statement. I confess that I often find "eh" to be very useful, if not necessary, in getting my point across during conversation.

For example, one might say, "It's really hot outside, eh?" In this instance, the "eh" invites the other person to respond in the affirmative to the previous statement. Conversely, if one agrees with the viewpoint of another person during a conversation, they might say, "I know, eh?" Which, roughly translated, means "Yes, I agree!"

Most Californians we met on our trip this year were not as presumptuous as our waiter that evening, but everyone that we talked to brought up pronunciation differences between Canadian and American English.

One of my least favorite is when Americans insist that Canadians pronounce words with the vowel combination "ou" as "oo." This is of particular annoyance to me since I find that most Americans mispronounce words of this family with the sound "au." So while Canadians are saying "boot," Americans are saying "baut" and both are really trying to say the word "boat."

When I was a child, I remember thinking, "They're crazy, I don't have an accent. They're the ones who talk funny!" For example, my parents took my sister and I to Cape Cod, Mass., which is about two hours outside of Boston and not far from New York. We had some friends there who had very strong Bostonian accents. My sister and I would laugh when they said "cah" for car and pronounce Arthur, the father of the family, as "Ahthuh." Looking back, I bet the friends that I made there were equally as fascinated with my Canadian accent.

Shukan ST: July 6, 2001

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