October 10, 2024 • 54 mins
Our guest was brought to us by our friend, Jane Siberry. John Chew has got to be one of the most interesting people in the world. This in depth conversation takes us from John's expertise in Scrabble, (Derek and I are so jealous,) to him being the editor in chief of possibly the coolest project anyone could be involved with, The Canadian English Dictionary. We thoroughly enjoyed this conversation with the nicest lexicographer that you could ever hope for!
Find out more at:
https://www.canadianenglishdictionary.ca/
Canadian As Heck Podcast on the Greatest Alternative Internet Radio Station at:
https://revolutionradio.live
Find out more at:
https://www.canadianenglishdictionary.ca/
Canadian As Heck Podcast on the Greatest Alternative Internet Radio Station at:
https://revolutionradio.live
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Formally Canadian as heck. Excuse me now, Canadian as heck,
formally Canadian AF. This is episode one two. Thank you
for joining us. My name is Craig G. Alongside my
man Derek Lewis. Wow, no, no explicit.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
I wow swear. I'm not going to swear this whole show.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Why not? That doesn't make any sense. You. I can literally,
I can literally see you right now. You're like you're
like a kid in the Candy Story. You're like you're
trying not to.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
I'm doing it mostly to upset the Army Chris.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Oh okay, gotcha sounds good. All right, poor Army Chris.
All right, my name again. My name is again Craig G.
Alongside Derek Lewis. This podcast Canadian Heck. We do this
every Monday night, nine pm Eastern Standard time. Last week
we had our new bestie on the program. Her name
is Jane Sibbery, and she was just absolutely wonderful. She
(00:58):
introduced us to this fellow who we are going to
have the incredible privilege of speaking with this evening, and
she's like, check this guy out, wait till you see
what he is doing. Well kind of not not in
your spare time. Or maybe in your spirit stop, we'll
essentially get to essentially what you're what you're doing, which
is an amazing thing here. So welcome to the program tonight,
(01:21):
mister John Cho. Thank you so much for joining us,
my friend. We appreciate your time tonight.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
Thank you. It's good to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Awesome. Okay, so listen, let's uh, let's dive right into this, John,
if you could give us an idea. Can you give
us a rundown of the things that you do for
a living, because there's a few of them.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Oh, for the last one you said, the last one
you said, I was like, that's great, so so save
that one for the last so that.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
We all sure.
Speaker 4 (01:51):
I do a bunch of things. I'm a full stack
software developer. I developed the election news graphics for a
major independent or major private Canadian broadcaster. I work for
a nonprofit called the Canadian Media Elections Consortium that gets
your all of your election data from the government to
all of the trusted media sources. So I'm a little
(02:14):
bit busy tonight getting ready for British Columbia near Brunswick
in Saskatchewan, all of which have provincial elections and don't
get me started as to what's going to happen in
Outawa and the next you know, but this is not
about that.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Do you have information? Do you have inside information?
Speaker 3 (02:27):
I do?
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Yeah, but but good we don't want.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
To that's we're talking about.
Speaker 4 (02:34):
Yeah, I do, And I was trained as a as
a mathematician. My my graduate degrees in mathematics. I've got
a undergraduate degree in mathematics and computer science and classical
studies or classical Greek to be precise. And the reason
for that is I've always had a fascination with words
(02:54):
in every language. I grew up in a in a
multi ethnic house. My father was a He died earlier
this year at the age of one hundred. As an
emeritus professor of linguistics, he spoke forty languages.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Like that's InCred yes for zero.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
For zero, yes.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
He would every year he would learn a new language
during his professional career.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Where do you put that?
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Like in your head?
Speaker 1 (03:26):
Like, where is that brain? I would think, probably that's incredible.
Speaker 4 (03:30):
I think it's actually the second language that's the hardest
one to learn, because once you get your brain stretched
in the right way to speak two languages, or to
understand languages or to think in two different ways, then
it's flexible enough to get the rest of them.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
And if you sort of go overboard, then you end
up where my dad was.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
But I still don't know French.
Speaker 4 (03:51):
I'm not sure you can call yourself Canadian unless you
can at least read the side of.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
A serial boox.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
I can read some of it. Yeah, but I'm interrupting, apologize,
but I'm just like, I'm still stuck on forty.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
That's incredible.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
So anyway, my mom was Japanese and she was a
language instructor. She taught Japanese as a Japanese to Americans
and Canadians, and so we had like long discussions about
words over every meal as we were as I was
growing up, and that the dining room would be the
dining table would be stacked up high with dictionaries on
(04:25):
every corner, so we could grab a Japanese dictionary or
an English dictionary, or you know, an etymological dictionary or
a French or German one. And so I grew up
around dictionaries, and I really I wasn't sure what I
was going to do with my life. I thought mathematician,
but it's hard work and not enough money. In it
(04:45):
and software developers kind of fun. There's a little bit
of money in it. But the conversations that I enjoyed
most were the ones that I had really growing up
with my parents about what do these words mean? Why
do Japanese and English speakers look at the world so differently,
Like Japanese doesn't have the idea of plural or singular,
(05:06):
but English doesn't have the idea of showing respect to
people by the choice of your first person pronoun.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
What's up with those?
Speaker 4 (05:14):
So fast forward to about twenty years ago. I've lost
track now. I started playing Scrabble and I ended up I.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
Did that as being a lover of words right.
Speaker 4 (05:29):
In fact, I started playing scrabble seriously when I was
living in France because I found I was starting to
lose my English fluency. My Japanese fluency was fine because
I was sending facts is every week to my mom
to tell her how I was doing, and I was
having to write a lot more in Japanese my English.
It was a French language working environment, so I was
just gradually losing it, and I thought, oh, I can
play scrabble on this Nintendo game Boy, which kind of
(05:52):
dates whenever that was, and that'll keep my English fluency.
At least I'll be able to memorize all the two
and three letter words, which you know, that's the most
important part of any.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
Language, right as a scrabble player.
Speaker 4 (06:04):
So I come back home to continue my degree, and
I think I need to keep playing scrabble, So I
play online and then I find a local club, and
then I start running tournaments. Because the guy that was
running the Toronto Scrabble Club, which was the biggest and
oldest club in the world for scrabble. The guy that
was running, a guy named like Whi's passed away younger
(06:25):
than I am now. And they said, you seem like
someone who can organize things and keep them going, and
you're already doing all the stats.
Speaker 3 (06:32):
Can you run this club for us?
Speaker 4 (06:33):
And I said, sure, I am supposed to do my degree,
but he is sure, I guess if you insist. And
then they said that means you've got to run a
tournament next month, and I thought, really, that seems like
a lot of work. So I ran a tournament. They said, oh,
that was great. You should come to like Boston and
run a tournament there, and you should, you know, run
(06:54):
the national championships, go to Bangkok and run this tournament,
and you should run world championship.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
It's all over the place.
Speaker 4 (07:00):
And so I did that for many years, and I'm
still the head of the North American scrab Players Association,
and I still do an awful lot of stuff that's
scrabble related. But we haven't even really touched on the
subject of this interview yet.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
Oh no, we've got lots we've got If you've got time,
we got time by friend, So so wrap away, go
for it.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
We're good.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
Well he's got a degree togain.
Speaker 4 (07:23):
Clearly, so I anybody wants to talk about Metafabonacci sequences,
that's that's a whole separate interview as well. The So
a couple of years ago, I, uh, my wife, who's
who's a freelance copy copy editor. She noticed a job
(07:43):
posting at the Editor's Association of Canada that said they
were looking for someone to work on editing a Canadian
English dictionary. And I thought, huh, yeah, you know what,
it's been like twenty years since we had a new
update to the Canadian Oxford Dictionary and that's getting really dated.
And she just sort of gave me a ten minute
lecture on how being a professional editor in Canada as
(08:07):
impossible because you have to refer to a dictionary that's
twenty years old if you want to know how to
spell or describe something and things we use words very
differently now than we did twenty years ago, Like.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
I'll get back to that.
Speaker 4 (08:22):
But so then I thought, huh, you know what, as
the acting chair of the North American Scrabble Players Association
Dictionary Committee and ex officio editor of the North American
Scrabble Player's Word List, if I got in on the
inside with a group of people working on editing a
new dictionary, I could get new words into the Scrabble
(08:46):
Tournament lexicon so we could play them in scrabble competitions
faster than any other way, because I've usually had to
sort of wait for dictionaries to be printed and then
buy a copy and then get someone to read all
the way words in the dictionary and then type the
ones that we should be good in and scrabbled into
our scrabble database. And so I'm by thinking, if I'm
(09:06):
on the inside, that'll be great and I get to
talk about words with people that like like words. So
I think the only way I can do this is
to is to apply for the position. I'll say I
can do that. I can edit your dictionary, and I think,
you know, I probably could, because I edit the Scrabble Dictionary,
at least the Scrabble word list. And you know, I
(09:28):
know a lot about words, and I know one thing
I know about words is that you don't really you
don't go to school to become a lexicographer a dictionary writer.
It's a craft. It's something that you learn by doing.
And I've been doing it on an amateur basis for
a while. And I know I have lots of friends
with lexicographers, and they're really looking for someone more like
(09:48):
a project manager or a volunteer coordinator. And I've done
that for the last twenty years of my life. So
I could do that. So but I thought, but there's
a risk here. They might actually want me to do it,
and I don't want to do that because I've already
got these other jobs and my wife will kill me
if I take on another job. So I thought, hmmm,
(10:08):
I will do my best to present myself as poorly
as I can in this interview. I will just phone
it in, except, of course, at the zoom. So I
don't update my resume. I just go to LinkedIn. I
guess everybody that does this. Now, though I go to LinkedIn,
I hit export as pdf, I email it to them.
(10:29):
I don't I don't bother with the cover letter, and
so I show up. I show up at at this
zoom interview.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
Trace professional sir.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
Yeah, exactly. That's amazing.
Speaker 4 (10:39):
Well, there's a lot of work involved in not getting
a job. You know, really really don't want to get
a job.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
It's really difficult to not get the job. You take
all the boxes and you're just like, oh god, I
don know what to do.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
There's a lot of work in not getting a job.
That is amazing. I love it. That's fantastic.
Speaker 4 (10:59):
Would up there and there's the you know, the president
of the Editors Association and the Distinguished Professor of the
English Language and Linguistics from University of British Columbia and
professional LEXA coogoverers and all they're just set.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
To grill me. And I'm thinking, I don't want to
really look stupid. This is going to be a really
fine line to walk between, you.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
Know, not wanting the job, yeah, but not looking like
a dummy.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
Exact exactly. I don't want to succeed. I don't want
to fail.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
Yeah, you don't want your name out there like, oh,
don't hire this guy or anything. Yeah, yeah exactly.
Speaker 3 (11:31):
But thankfully or not.
Speaker 4 (11:34):
They led with, so we think you're the guy, and
they said, we really have not had any other serious candidates,
so just you know, we've booked this time to interview you.
Just go ahead and tell us how you would do this.
And so then I had to think on the fly
about you know, we actually how would you edit a dictionary?
And so I mean, obviously the reason that I'm talking
(11:55):
to you here is that they said, well, the job
is yours if you want to. And then I had
a long talk talk with my wife and she said,
what kind of a job is this? Is this sort
that pays money or and takes a lot of your time?
Is it the one where Stiper get a lot of
hate mail? And I said, uh, no, money upfront, money
down the road, hate mail. Eventually, down the road, it'll
(12:18):
come with the money. And so I waited a couple
of days and then eventually said, yeah, sure I'll do
this thing. But so the reason that it's difficult, the
reason that it hasn't been one in a little while.
I'm going to sort of give you a two minute
history of Canadian lexicography. First of all, what is Canadian English?
Speaker 3 (12:41):
Like?
Speaker 4 (12:42):
Do we actually have Canadian Is there such a thing
as Canadian English? It's hard to say, As with anything Canadian,
our first stab at defining what something that is Canadian
is by saying it's something it's not American right. If
the Americans spell it without the youth, then we spell
it with the you American spell at er, we spell
it right. But you can't. You can't define things it
(13:06):
by negatives. The other big issue with defining what Canadian
is English is is that Newfoundland English. Is that the
same as the English that they speak in downtown Montreal
or the English that they speak in suburban Toronto. No,
these are all very different things. Is the English that
they speak in the far North the same? No, that
(13:26):
everybody speaks with a different set of words, with a
different set of pronunciations either. So it's a little bit
takes some uncharacteristically un Canadian gall to sort of set
yourself as the arbiter of what is Canadian English. Thankfully,
I've developed a fairly thick skin from editing the Scrabble Dictionary,
(13:47):
so I'm ready for that part.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
But so.
Speaker 4 (13:53):
The idea of having a Canadian dictionary in the first
place was not a Canadian idea. It was, of course
an American idea. And there was this guy named Charles
Lovell who in the ninety he was he's actually worth.
I need to do a YouTube video about him or something.
He left home as a teenager. He was a literal hobo.
(14:16):
He rode the rails, going from library to library to
research words, and eventually decided that he needed to do
something with all of his knowledge, and he got hired
by an American lexicographer to research americanisms, words that were
original to America in the United States. And while he
was doing this, he noticed that a lot of words
(14:38):
that they were putting into this dictionary that he was
working on were actually canadianisms, but the Americans were taking
credit for it, and this bothered him, so he came up.
He went on a trip up north to meet with
some Canadian linguists and said, what is your problem. This
is in the nineteen fifties. He said, what is your problem?
Why don't you have a dictionary of your own? Britain's
got Oxford and and other dictionaries, and the United States
(15:02):
at that point had probably half a dozen.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
Different good dictionaries, including Marion Webster.
Speaker 4 (15:07):
He came up here and said, why are you letting
the Americans tell you what your language is, or.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
Even say that it's their language?
Speaker 4 (15:14):
And so that led to like a ten to fifteen
year project that culminated in nineteen sixty seven, the Canadian
Centennial year, with the first series of series Canadian dictionaries
published by what was then the Gauge Publishing Company, and
those ended up being in schools everywhere. If you have
a certain age, you'll remember the Big Engage Dictionary. And
(15:37):
then as soon as one of them was published, well,
it's sort of a familiar Canadian story. But other publishers thought,
other American based publishers especially thought oh, well, we could
make some money off of that, and so they started
taking American dictionaries and then sort of sprinkling a little
bit of maple syrup on them and shipping them up
north so that they could sell.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
Them as Canadian dictionaries.
Speaker 4 (15:59):
And this sort of went on until the end of
the end of the last millennium, when Oxford Oxford University
Press in particular, said we'll show you guys how to
do it right. It's it's this is clearly you know,
you've got a bunch of Americans and a cup and
some Canadian hosers basically who have no idea what they're
(16:19):
doing editing dictionaries. You don't have the scholarship or credentials
to do it. We will show you how it's done.
And they came in and they produced, you know, two editions.
Captain Barbera produced two lovely editions of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary,
and then sadly she died.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
But before she.
Speaker 4 (16:35):
Died, the Oxford University Press realized a fundamental fact about
dictionaries in the century, which is you can't make money
with them. It's it's not a commercial activity because the
dictionary takes millions of dollars because they're just they're really
labor intensive because you've got to research every word, and
(16:56):
the words change faster than you can research them, so
you have to have a large number of people. You
need volunteers, but you also need just it's just they're gigantic,
thankless projects, and if you try to if you try
to run them as commercial enterprises, you'll fail. And everybody
decided that over the course of the first decade in
(17:19):
the century, which is why we have no dictionaries anymore.
But so the editors need a dictionary, They're not the
only ones that need a dictionary. I mean, I would
argue that everybody who reads or writes in English and
Canada probably would benefit from having a dictionary. They would
benefit from having a Canadian English dictionary being licensed to
(17:40):
the major tech companies, so that when you select which dictionary,
you're auto correcting to a Canadian rather than US.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
Or that's or UK. That's right. The only place I
know that actually does that is YouTube. YouTube actually has
a selection where it says English, American or Canadian.
Speaker 3 (17:56):
So Americans really don't get that.
Speaker 4 (18:00):
They say, you know, can't you just choose between you
k The one example that is usually is often given
is if I go to the Costco in Toronto, and
Costco is an American chain. If I go to the
tire center at the Costco, I will see a sign
there that can only appear in Canada because it'll spell
tire t I r E the American way and it'll
spell center ce n tre. The British way, tire would
(18:24):
be with a y in England and center would be er.
So although those individual spellings I say that they're from
other countries, that phrase tire center is a purely Canadian
thing that would not make sense anywhere else. And yet
if there isn't a dictionary to tell you that, then
it's just word of mouth. And if you're trying to
(18:44):
edit at something or write something, if we don't do
this right now, we will eventually end up in a
world where Canadians are speaking nothing but or reading and
writing and communicating in only sort of AI approved American English.
So it's a critical moment to be doing it.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
Oh good for you and honestly good for all of
you to to be doing this. I do have a
word that I actually wanted to run by you because
I know that it's said differently in different parts of
the country. How many people are involved in this project.
Speaker 4 (19:15):
Well, we've got about a dozen people. It's fewer, a
lot fewer than you would think. We have about a
dozen people that I meet with by zoom over the
course of the course of a week. We have an
editorial meeting and then a general meeting. We have a
sign up on our on our website, Canadian Canadian English
Dictionary dot ca right now for volunteers, and we've had
(19:37):
over fifty people volunteer. In fact, fifty is kind of
too many people to volunteer, so I've had I had
to choose one of them to be the volunteer coordinator.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Right, I'm going to have to put my wife in
touch with you, because she's like a literally a logo
file like my wife is literally, Like my wife is literally,
you know, she's she's literally she would love so anyway, sorry.
Speaker 4 (19:58):
So we we are primarily looking for people that can
help with the early stages of developing a dictionary this
but and I'll tell you what we're doing is that
by the end of the year, we hope to have
all of the words and phrases that start with the
letter Q defined. We started with letter Q, which is
an unusual choice for a dictionary because it's a short
section of the dictionary, but it's a meaningful section of
(20:20):
the dictionary. So, and it's also one who's that has
changed a lot over the course of the last twenty years.
We lost Queen Elizabeth, So anything any phrase like the
queen's printer or Queen's Council that an as an obsolete definition.
We've had a lot of We've had geographical terms. If
you're on the West Coast, you know, it's not the
Queen Charlotte Islands Islands anymore. It's the High to Guai.
(20:45):
If you think about words like queer or queen, the
situations in which you can say those and the reaction
to using those words, say in a dark alley in
downtown Toronto are very different now from what they were
twenty years ago, right And there's also you know, there's
(21:06):
a lot of Indigenous origin words. I'm in a long
running debate right now as to whether or not the
word kayak should be spelled ka y a k or
qa j a q, which is more authentic to people
from the far North. And then they're just things that
ideas that didn't exist twenty years ago, like quad copter
(21:28):
for a drone, or quad mester if you had to
go beyond the semester system because you're because your school
system was cohorted during the pandemic, stuff like that, so
we chose a letter Q. We're busily trying to define
all of the words, and while we do that, we're
developing our best practices, developing a series of guides to
(21:52):
how to define words for the little guideans through the
rest of the dictionary, and developing their processes for that.
We're looking for people who have a knack for defining words,
which is really difficult to identify. Actually you want I
think we want more people like technical writers than creatives
for that, because just the idea of how to precisely
(22:15):
define something in a way that doesn't exclude things that
aren't part of it, but includes everything that can be
part of it.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
Yeah, because you're not looking necessarily for like fictional writers.
You're looking more for like actual, concrete, evidential. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4 (22:32):
And also we want people that have for the for
the defining part. We need people that are that don't
have big egos about their knowledge of English, because everybody
will find if they look up a word like in books,
dot Google dot com, or in a dictionary, they'll find
(22:52):
that it's used in ways that they personally would not
use it, that they might not have heard it being used.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
So you take the word like.
Speaker 4 (23:01):
Quiz quiz for example, a quiz its meaning has changed
a lot over the past one hundred years thanks to
the influence of quiz shows it really means right now
to sort of like a pop quiz, a test of
your knowledge.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
Right.
Speaker 4 (23:13):
It used to mean like an eccentric person, and people
don't use it that much. But so then there's a
question does it belong in the dictionary? Well, yes, because
one of the purposes a dictionary is to help people
understand older texts. Basically, any word that they might be
encountering as a modern Canadian, they might want to look
(23:33):
it up in a dictionary to say what was this
person talking about? And there are still people that were
born like a long time ago who are write using
the language of a long time ago. So you know,
there's that. The next step beyond definers is we need
people to edit that, and those we have a lot
of because you know, we started off with the Editors
(23:55):
Association at least forty of the fifty people or editors,
and they're saying, we're happy to things, but we don't
want to want to come up with new things, you know,
come up with new.
Speaker 3 (24:03):
Content beyond that the usual.
Speaker 4 (24:07):
The usual needs that an organization has people to do
interviews like this, people to push our social media, people
to to organize things. I mean, we just only at
the beginning of this month, managed to get ourselves incorporated,
and we've got to go down the process of setting
ourselves up as a charity.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
Got old incorporation. Oh yes.
Speaker 4 (24:28):
But basically, if if you, if you like words, there's
almost certainly something that you could do to help us
with our project.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
So that's that is super I just I just sent
it to you, Derek.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
I want I want everybody to know.
Speaker 4 (24:44):
Sorry, sorry, sorry, Canadian English Dictionary dot c a's it.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
So I want to ask you about about a word. Yeah,
so am I Actually this is you are just properly awesome. Okay,
So there's a word that I know. I'm a musician.
Derek is a musician as well. And if I was
to go on tour all throughout Canada in the sort
of the central and on the West coast, I'm going
(25:14):
on tour on the East coast, I'm going on tour.
So I'm wondering, like words like that, how do you
end up kind of getting them into a dictionary and
sort of having the definition of of what it is?
You know, And you know, obviously there's things like a
(25:34):
golf tour, so there's all sorts of different types of tours.
But how do you again also show the different pronunciations
of the words.
Speaker 4 (25:46):
So dictionaries not to get two technical, but the dictionaries
traditionally have two different ways of expressing pronunciations. They've got
what's called the International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA, which is
used everywhere outside of the United States, and they have
so called spelling systems where you where you spell a
spell a made up word that, if pronounced by a
(26:08):
typical speaker might come out sounding the way you want
the word to be pronounced.
Speaker 3 (26:12):
And you can.
Speaker 4 (26:13):
Probably tell that I'm leaning more towards the former rather
than the latter. There's more subtlety to it. The reason
that I prefer IPA is that one of the major
groups of people that are interested in their dictionary is
first generation immigrants to Canada who are native speakers of English.
(26:33):
That is to say, people who have come here from
other English speaking parts of the world. But notice that
when they speak their English every now and then people
have no idea what they're talking about, talking.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
About or.
Speaker 4 (26:48):
Or or people just stop and look at them funny
and say, you're not from around here? Are so for them?
Everybody outside of North America is used to the IPA,
so it would be I think a good place to
start for our for our online dictionary.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
We do I p A.
Speaker 4 (27:03):
We will eventually early on have automatically generated audio versions
because it's easy to convert IPA to audio, and probably
at some point we will do some sort of respelling
system just because there's a lot of demand for it
from people who grew up with those. But uh, you know,
as I said, you don't get an you don't get
(27:25):
accuracy when you do respelling.
Speaker 3 (27:28):
Systems, So I uh yeah, I'm not I'm not keen
on those. Mind you, This doesn't really answer the question.
Speaker 4 (27:36):
That's sort of underlying the premise of your Crest question,
which was the tour versus tour distinction, and that basically
we have to do it past lex lexic cogrovers have done,
which is, we pick one variety of Canadian English to
privilege over others, and then we explain how the others
(27:58):
differ from that in some front matters. So typically the
main pronunciation will be given as tour. That is to say,
we would probably be using a h an educated urban
variety of Central Canadian English, so that is to say,
(28:18):
the way it's spoken actually not even necessarily central, So
the way the way English is spoken in why educating
people in downtown Toronto or downtown Vancouver, or downtown Winnipeg,
downtown Calgary, not Montreal, because there's significant differences to the
language there, and and then there'd be in the front
(28:40):
matter to the dictionary when it's eventually published, or in
an article on the blog when it's eventually created, will
be explanations of how the how the phonology difference differs
from one part of the country to another, and how
you know, if you want to sound sound like you're
from down east, you need to, you know, say tour
and not tour.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
Yeah, yes, I I'm still stuck on forty. But I'm like,
I'm still like continuously losing it every time you say.
Speaker 5 (29:08):
Something else, and I'm like, I'm like, this is like,
this is the most this is the most fascinating thing,
and like the thing like the i'm i'm, I'm I'm
never I love I love broken English.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
I love it right because it tells me. It Broken
English tells me that you you this isn't your first English,
isn't your first language, which means you speak another language,
and that fascinates the crap out of me because I
have the hardest time learning anything. My family's from Denmark
and I don't. I don't speak Danish. I don't. My
(29:44):
my youngest sister speaks Danish, my younger brother speaks Danish,
and my my parents speak Danish, and my grandparents spoke Danish,
but I don't.
Speaker 3 (29:55):
It's no idea what.
Speaker 4 (29:57):
It's a difficult language to learn to pronounce because the
speech sounds sound more like respiratory illness to English speakers.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
It's true, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 (30:16):
The so what you say, what you say is right,
that that that there are so many different varieties of
English being spoken in Canada because of the because you know,
half the people in Toronto are from born born outside
of Canada. My mother used to say that she thought
Toronto would be a good place to improve her English skills,
and it turned out to be the worst place in
(30:36):
the world because people are way too tolerant here of
any type of English. Because you know, people with thick
Chinese accents have to be able to communicate to do
business with people with thick South Asian accents, and they
use English as the as the lingua franca because that's
what that's what everybody here in theory speaks. But you'll
never hear anybody here correcting someone else's English.
Speaker 3 (30:58):
I mean, unless they're an editor.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
So the other thing, they don't say something like that's absolutely.
Speaker 4 (31:03):
Wrong, well, or or if they say something that indicates
they're they're an American.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
So that's that's another category.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
We nail into the wall.
Speaker 3 (31:11):
Yeah, they can talk that way up here. We don't.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
We don't say stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (31:17):
My daddy, my dad, who was born in the United
States and moved here actually as ah shortly shortly after
I was born, said one of the hardest habits for
an American to stop saying, to stop using linguistically was
the phrase in this country.
Speaker 3 (31:35):
And he, like Americans tend to.
Speaker 4 (31:37):
Say, well in this country, we don't do that, regardless
of what country there they happened to be in. And
that's something that really creates on Canadian actually everywhere everywhere
around the world. That creates some people's nerves when Americans
do that. The I wanted to go back to the
volunteer thing. One area the so so so much to
(32:02):
talk about. In addition to the Editors Association, we're partnered
with something called the Canadian English Lab at UBC run
by Professor ste Stephen Dalonger, and also with the Strathi
Unit of STRATH the English Unit at Queen's University Queen's
University Edits or the Stratha unit there has created something
called the Canadian English Corpus, where corpus is a linguistics
(32:26):
term for collection of a representative sample of all of
the all of the uses of a language, a large
sampling of a language that people can study to figure
out what exactly is Canadian English. So they're in the
process of updating their Canadian English Corpus to serve as
a as a foundation for our dictionary. And one of
the things that they're doing right now is that they're
(32:47):
actively recruiting people writers, player rights and authors and so
on who want to contribute content to the Corpus for
research purposes. And then actually, one thing that one thing
that I really liked about the Gauge Dictionary is the
frequency with which they use examples, because there's nothing better
(33:09):
than an example to illustrate to someone who isn't familiar
with the word how you how you should how a
word is actually used. And so we're looking for people
who are writers, authors, playwrights, poets who are willing to
(33:30):
let us quote from their work as examples of.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
Ideal or typical Canadian English.
Speaker 4 (33:37):
So if you've already done the writing right, if you've
already done the writing, we don't expect you to do
it again in the form of the definition. But if
you think you've written a look that is, you know,
the Great Canadian novel and it's got some interesting uses,
especially of words starting with the letter Q, then please
get in touch with.
Speaker 3 (33:55):
Us and we'll be happy to to use yours.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
Well, that's so, that's so cool. You were talking about
there being a million things to talk about, but in
regards to, you know, recruiting new people and people to
help out with this, is there anything else that you
can think of as far as as far as you know,
any other help that you can think of that you
(34:20):
might need.
Speaker 4 (34:21):
We're getting close to the point where we will be
making a financial appeal and that little go up on
our website and.
Speaker 3 (34:26):
You'll hear about it when we do.
Speaker 4 (34:28):
At this point, I've really been touched by the amount,
by the amount of volunteer labor and in kind contributions
that we've had when we've had to pay people.
Speaker 3 (34:37):
It's come out of people's university grant money.
Speaker 4 (34:39):
But mostly people if I tell them, you know, if
you wanted to find a few words, eventually I'll put
you on the payroll. They'll say, here, have a dozen definitions,
or you know, everybody that's been working on the project
so far, including myself, has been doing so entirely pro
bono because we think, you know, we believe strongly that
something that the country needs to help maintain our sense
(35:02):
of national identity.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
Oh.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
Absolutely. I've got a couple of questions here for you.
Do you have a favorite set of reference books, or
a favorite dictionary, or a favorite etymological dictionary or anything
like that. Is there anything that stands out that you
think to yourself, I loved it when I read that
back in the day.
Speaker 4 (35:23):
The second question is, yeah, I'm going I'm going to
possibly upset some people, but because I have a lot
of friends that work at Merriam Webster, the dictionary company.
But my favorite dictionary growing up was the Webster's New
World Dictionary, which was one of their major competitors, and
the reason that it was my favorite was that they
(35:45):
gave very detailed etymologies.
Speaker 3 (35:48):
Or word origins for all of their words.
Speaker 4 (35:51):
And you could look up any word and it would
tell you this goes back to Old English word this,
and French that and Latin back all the way back
to Proto into Europe and roots.
Speaker 3 (36:01):
And it's just.
Speaker 4 (36:02):
A lot of work to do that, and I don't
think we'll get there in my lifetime for the Canadian
English dictionary, but etymologies were a big part of my
life growing up, so that was definitely my favorite.
Speaker 2 (36:15):
Nice go ahead, Derek, Okay, so we have your favorite dictionary.
So Sir Ben Kingsley was asked live on air at
once what his favorite word in the English language was
and he came out with an expletive, which I'm refraining
from saying, good for you, Derek, because I want to
(36:36):
upset the army prits. But it started with an aff
and didn't say fire truck. Okay, what so in the
in the in the in the in the in the
vein of what we're talking about about your your Canadian
English dictionary today, what would be like for you would
(36:59):
be the ultimate like your your your top gear, like Canadian,
this is a Canadian word, and and like no like
no one else can claim this, this is a Canadian
word and this is where it sits.
Speaker 1 (37:14):
I could think of a coman.
Speaker 4 (37:19):
So Professor Stephen Dollinger at the University of British Columbia
HASS He's written a book about canadianisms and he edits
a work that's going to be a big contributor to
ours called the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, and
it is an online catalog of every word that is
a Canadianism and being a being a good Austrian academic,
(37:42):
He's sub categorized canadianisms according to whether they are Canadian
and origin.
Speaker 3 (37:48):
I'm not going to be able to get the whole list.
Speaker 4 (37:50):
Canadian and origin Canadian because we kept them after kept
the word after everybody else started to stop using it Canadian,
because we changed the meaning Canadian, because it has this
meaning to us that is positive, Canadian because it has
a special meaning to us that is negative.
Speaker 3 (38:05):
And there's one more, but I don't know what it is.
Speaker 4 (38:08):
The uh And just reading through his dictionary is just
such as a It's a collection of rabbit holes that
take you into our into our history. You learn things
that you don't want to know, you learn things that
you do want to know. You learn I think I
think the first one that it came across in the
(38:29):
letter researching the letter Q was the phrase quadruped snowshoe,
and I was thinking, what the heck is that and
what would you need it for? A quadruped snowshoe is
a bag of hay that you tie onto the bottom
onto the bottom of a mule's foot when you're trying
(38:49):
to get it to drag stuff out of a mine
in the mountains in BC in the nineteenth century. And
I was thinking, yeah, so, okay, there's that one of
your In your chat, someone is asking about the word kayak.
Kayak is an interesting question because, as I said earlier,
do you spell it k a y a K or
(39:09):
q a j a q? And I would rather spell
it q a j a q, And I would rather
pluralize it kayak eight q a j A I T.
Except that a kayak doesn't necessarily mean what is known
as a kayak in the far North. Here in England
or the United States, they put motors on kayaks and
(39:31):
sales on kayaks and build them out of fiberglass, and
they make things that I don't think are kayaks, but
maybe kayak's with a K.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
That's just weird.
Speaker 4 (39:42):
There's there's a word that I found that was missing
from the from the Dictionary of Canadianisms, which came up
actually in a conversation with a group of Jane Sibbery
or last week's guests UH support team last week, which
was the word haw eater h A w e A
(40:02):
t e R haw eater, haw eater. That is purely Canadian.
It's actually a very local Canadian word. It's only found
in one part. Would you care to guess what a
haw eater is?
Speaker 2 (40:14):
I want to know where it's from.
Speaker 3 (40:18):
It is from what region?
Speaker 2 (40:20):
What region you're talking about?
Speaker 4 (40:21):
It is from the largest island in a lake in
the world. Oh Jesus, And that island, if you're a
geographical trivia fan, also has the largest lake on an island.
It goes down to this, got the largest island on
a lake on an island on a lake.
Speaker 2 (40:39):
Yeah, yeah, interesting.
Speaker 4 (40:42):
It's the island in question is Manitoulin Island, and a
haw eater refers to someone who was born on Manitulin
Island really where they have hawberries that are a traditional
source of vitamin C.
Speaker 3 (40:54):
So I don't know.
Speaker 4 (40:56):
For me, it's always whatever. The most recent word that
I've that I've come across us. That is, uh, the
one that comes to mind first before this, The word
that I was struggling to define for the dictionary was
the word I'm going to pronounce it and then spell it.
Speaker 3 (41:13):
I pronounced it co hog.
Speaker 4 (41:16):
And it can be spelled c O H O G,
but I prefer to spell it because it's more points
in scrabble.
Speaker 3 (41:24):
Q U A h A U.
Speaker 1 (41:27):
G so h a U G.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
Yeah, a lot of letters.
Speaker 3 (41:34):
So and he guesses what a co hog is?
Speaker 2 (41:37):
Uh, I have no idea. I know it's where family
guys place, right right.
Speaker 4 (41:47):
It is there, you go, okay and uh. So it's
a word that comes from Rhode Island and it refers
to a type of a type of clam.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
It's said that right after she's it's a sea creature.
Speaker 4 (42:04):
It is one of the types of shells that was
used by First Nations peoples in the United States to
create what we call wamp them. It is still used
as a it's what you make clam chowder out of
it if you're in New England.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
Nice.
Speaker 4 (42:22):
But it's actually the more you delve into it, the
more complicated it gets. Because biologists divide cohogs into three
different species, two of which are related, and the third
one isn't they all sort of look the same. But
then you try to think, how am I going to
explain this in a dictionary definition that's shorter than an
(42:43):
encyclopedia entry, And so far I've gotten it down to
like twenty lines, but I really want to get it
down to five lines. But the more you read about
any specific thing, the harder it is to leave information out.
So like, there's this one type of cohog called the
ocean cohog, which is found mainly an ice Iceland and
the like the northern Atlantic. It's known for the fact
(43:06):
that there was a co hog that was harvested maybe
ten years ago. They knew that co hogs lived to
be to ridiculously old ages long they had long lives.
They dissected one and did a scanning electron micross could
be thing with its shell and found that it was
(43:27):
five hundred years old, and it set the record for
the longest lived life form animal in the world whose
age had been precisely determined. So I'm thinking that's more
trivia and more encyclopedic than dictionary. But now that I've
heard this and now that I also know that you
can get ocean co hogs in Canada, how can I not?
(43:50):
I know, I'll put it in a usage example. Did
you know ocean co hogs are? So that's probably the
way that it'll end up, but I'm going to pull
that out of party.
Speaker 1 (43:59):
And of course it ends up being in the Q section,
which you're working really hard on anyway, So yeah, perfect, right,
right now?
Speaker 2 (44:08):
What was the first What was the first when you
when you started when you started in? What was the
first word Q?
Speaker 3 (44:13):
The letter Q? Which is which is? Which is difficult
on its own.
Speaker 4 (44:16):
Actually I looked at the letter Q and I thought, no,
this is going to be for the second past through
because it's hard to define the letter Q as an abbreviation,
as a letter. It's scientific uses. You end up going
into deep philosophical territory when you say, what's the difference
(44:38):
between when you say Q, do you mean the letter
as it's printed on a piece of paper or the
sound that you think it makes or the arbitrary con
concept of the seventh Q is the.
Speaker 3 (44:54):
Seventeenth seventeenth letter of a sequence? Right?
Speaker 4 (44:57):
If you label things A, B, C, D, E, F,
G and Z on or do you mean something that
is abbreviated to Q, like a question or a queen
or that sort of thing. So it's just it was
too complicated an entry, so I decided I was going
to jump over to something much easier to define, and
then discovered that nothing is really easy to define if
(45:17):
you look at it closely enough. Yeah, and that was
something that actually the professional Lexa coggoverers that I worked
with reminded me of time and again, which is that
if you want to actually get a dictionary written, you
need to develop the skills to avoid falling into the
rabbit holes and figure out, you know, conciseness, which clearly
(45:38):
is not my forte forty seven forty five minutes into
a half hour interview.
Speaker 1 (45:42):
Yeah, no, exactly. No. Hey, listen, like I said, we're good,
So if you're good, we're good. I wanted to I
wanted to ask you if there is a word that
kind of as that you've been going through and doing
all of this incredible work that you and your team
are doing. Is there a word that all of you
just kind of were like, I can't believe I forgot
(46:05):
that word is completely like looney or something like. Is
there something that you all were just like, oh my goodness, yeah,
I can't believe that on hell right.
Speaker 4 (46:14):
Well there was there was actually surprising omission from like
so when we when we the very first step in
defining a section of words is deciding which words you're
going to include, and it has to be an approximation
at first. But I mean, first we look at the
at our predecessor in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, and we
see what words they looked at. And then we look
(46:35):
at the Gauge Dictionary because it has a different sort
of editorial policy. We'll look at Merriam Webster's online publications
to see what's been what's current.
Speaker 3 (46:44):
I do searches through.
Speaker 4 (46:48):
Any documents that I can get my hands on from
the corpus, including the staff at several of the hancered
public handsred offices at legislatures across the country have been
very helpful in providing legislative records that that I can
scan through, so I look for new words. And that
was how it came across things like the modern sense
of the word quad, uh, quad shair. Actually there's a
(47:12):
bunch of there's a bunch of quad words that quad
has become a more productive prefix than it used to be.
Speaker 3 (47:16):
But anyway, so.
Speaker 4 (47:19):
The you look at all these words and and you
also keep an eye out as you're working on the
letter queue for you know, in conversation, did someone use
a word? Because when when you if you've been staring
at a few thousand Q words for several months, if
someone uses a word that is not in your in
that list, you'll you'll realize right away. There's a excellent episode.
(47:45):
Actually I'll get back to No, I'm actually I can
digress into that. There's a Are you familiar with the
comedy series black Adder by Rowan Atkinson?
Speaker 1 (47:53):
Yes, yeah, very much so.
Speaker 2 (47:55):
Yeah, black Adder like a bird that swallowed a plate.
Speaker 4 (47:59):
Have you watched the do you recall the episode where
the lexicographer appears and uh and Blackadder starts using he
just starts making up words to drive the lexicographer insane
because thinks that he's completed his work and.
Speaker 3 (48:17):
He just starts making up ridiculous for it is expl
what did you say? How do you spell that? So?
Speaker 4 (48:25):
And I thought he was I thought he was just
you know, having fun, But it turns out no, if
you've actually spent a lot of time studying a set
of words, and then someone uses a word that you
know should have been on that list that is not.
It just sets off alarm bells in your head. So
the most reasonable one of that of that sort that
I found was I was really surprised that none of
(48:46):
our uh, like, the Canadian Oxford Dictionary does not list
Queen's University as as an entry. Oh wow, you think
major Canadian institution like that. They list the the New
York City Borough of Queens, but not Queen's University. And
you're thinking that's a really strange bias.
Speaker 1 (49:06):
That wow, so weird. Always always American, right, always American.
Speaker 2 (49:15):
Maybe you don't like dan Ackroyd.
Speaker 3 (49:17):
It's it's an illustration of how.
Speaker 4 (49:21):
It's uh, it's it's difficult. No, it's it's impossible to
get it one hundred percent right. Which is why I
look at the project as being an ongoing, sustainable one.
And this is something that I made in my original
pitch to the Editor's Association. I said, we're building something
that's going to be around, I hope for decades, if
not centuries. We're building we want to build the Canadian
(49:43):
equivalent to the Oxford English Dictionary. I mean, if you're
going to be ambitious, you might as well aim for
the sky. But yes, we want something that's going to
be updated on a regular basis. And the good thing
about updating things on a regular basis is that you
can never be be justly accused of being incomplete. You
can just say, oh, Queen's University, that'll be in the
(50:05):
next edition, don't don't worry about it. So, so languages
is continuously evolving, right. There are words that that people
use this year that they weren't using last year, or
that they've changed the meanings of.
Speaker 3 (50:16):
So it is something that we have to be constantly
on the lookout for.
Speaker 1 (50:19):
This has been the coolest freaking interview that we've done,
and like, honest to god, so straight up honest, I'm like,
I'm really like, I'm not a I'm not a brainiac, right,
I'm just I'm not one of those guys. If you
ask me anything about like, you know, who recorded you know,
the the Beatles Rubber Soul album in nineteen sixty five,
I could tell you easily. But you know what I mean,
(50:42):
there's certain things that I'm very knowledgeable about, and I'll
be straight up honest with you. I was kind of
a little intimidated after seeing like your LinkedIn page and
seeing you know this, like seeing everything, kind of a
little intimidated, but you are just so freaking cool. Like, well,
my wife and I we just to sell really quickly.
(51:02):
My wife and I every Sunday night, at eight pm
Eastern Standard time, do a little thing we play. We
play called Radier Games. Don't say it, Derek. We play
reindeer games at eight pm every Sunday night. And my
wife is just the creator of all the content she does.
We do a madlib every week, right, because she loves
she writes some of the best mad libs you've ever
(51:23):
seen in your life. Right, And she asked me, you know,
like I feel good when I'm like, oh, you know,
I can I can give you a transitive verb or
an intransitive verb, like you know, things like that. Right.
So it's just it's so much fun. But anyway, the
cum quats are awesome. That's our friend Angela. She actually
joined us on that program quite often. I should get
you to play with us. That would be freaking wicked.
(51:45):
We got to get you on Reindeer Games, for sure.
Speaker 3 (51:48):
I'm happy to ye.
Speaker 1 (51:49):
Oh my god, that would be a there should actually,
if I could figure out a way to do like
an online scrabble thing, I'm sure that we know by.
Speaker 2 (51:59):
The way, Raindear games where you win absolutely nothing, not
even the adoration of your friends.
Speaker 1 (52:04):
That's right, it's very funny. Derek Lewis and I made
fun of you on one hundred episode with that. We'll
talk to John about that later. But anyway, listen, is
there is there anything else that you want to share
with us? Is there anything that as far as like
addresses or anything like that that you want to let
people know where they can join, where they can help you.
Speaker 3 (52:26):
No, I'm good things.
Speaker 4 (52:27):
So I think just the website that's got contact information,
has got a form people can fill out if they
want to be on our mailing list and so on.
Speaker 1 (52:34):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2 (52:37):
That is great. Like that is just so cool to
like to be able to be like I think that's
really neat, to be able to be part like to
be part of of like something historical like that, like
actually have like like and not like you know, fanfare
and ticker table braides or anything, but to be able
to be like, oh uh, you know poutine. I defined poutine.
Speaker 4 (53:01):
Yeah, it is literally meaningful work.
Speaker 2 (53:06):
Yeah, that's grid.
Speaker 1 (53:08):
That is absolutely brilliant what you just said. That's literally
that's got to be your slogan, my friend, we have
the most meaningful work.
Speaker 4 (53:18):
I have to write that down because I just I
just thought of it, right. I think it's going to
be our our slogan.
Speaker 1 (53:24):
And your friends A Canadian as heck helped you get there.
Just kidding. It was all you.
Speaker 3 (53:29):
It was totally all you.
Speaker 2 (53:30):
The Canadian English Dictionary where you could win absolutely nothing.
Speaker 1 (53:34):
Not adoration of yours, John Chew. This has been an
absolute pleasure, my friend. We we want to thank our good,
our dear friend Jane Sibbery for making this happen. So Jane,
thank you so much. And John, I am going to
talk to you if you if you don't mind about
reindeer games. I would love to get you on some
(53:55):
time because that would be so much fun and you
don't have to worry about the ethernet and all that stuff.
The way that you're the way that you're on right
now is perfect. Okay, So we'll have some fun with that.
But this has been an amazing interview. Thank you so
much for your time, and we are going to spin
from bound by the beauty back in nineteen eighty nine.
We're going to spend a beautiful tune for you by
(54:16):
your friend James Sibbery called Hockey. So again, thank you
so much for your time, John all the best, Thanks
so much, have a great night.
Formally Canadian as heck. Excuse me now, Canadian as heck,
formally Canadian AF. This is episode one two. Thank you
for joining us. My name is Craig G. Alongside my
man Derek Lewis. Wow, no, no explicit.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
I wow swear. I'm not going to swear this whole show.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Why not? That doesn't make any sense. You. I can literally,
I can literally see you right now. You're like you're
like a kid in the Candy Story. You're like you're
trying not to.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
I'm doing it mostly to upset the Army Chris.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Oh okay, gotcha sounds good. All right, poor Army Chris.
All right, my name again. My name is again Craig G.
Alongside Derek Lewis. This podcast Canadian Heck. We do this
every Monday night, nine pm Eastern Standard time. Last week
we had our new bestie on the program. Her name
is Jane Sibbery, and she was just absolutely wonderful. She
(00:58):
introduced us to this fellow who we are going to
have the incredible privilege of speaking with this evening, and
she's like, check this guy out, wait till you see
what he is doing. Well kind of not not in
your spare time. Or maybe in your spirit stop, we'll
essentially get to essentially what you're what you're doing, which
is an amazing thing here. So welcome to the program tonight,
(01:21):
mister John Cho. Thank you so much for joining us,
my friend. We appreciate your time tonight.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
Thank you. It's good to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Awesome. Okay, so listen, let's uh, let's dive right into this, John,
if you could give us an idea. Can you give
us a rundown of the things that you do for
a living, because there's a few of them.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Oh, for the last one you said, the last one
you said, I was like, that's great, so so save
that one for the last so that.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
We all sure.
Speaker 4 (01:51):
I do a bunch of things. I'm a full stack
software developer. I developed the election news graphics for a
major independent or major private Canadian broadcaster. I work for
a nonprofit called the Canadian Media Elections Consortium that gets
your all of your election data from the government to
all of the trusted media sources. So I'm a little
(02:14):
bit busy tonight getting ready for British Columbia near Brunswick
in Saskatchewan, all of which have provincial elections and don't
get me started as to what's going to happen in
Outawa and the next you know, but this is not
about that.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Do you have information? Do you have inside information?
Speaker 3 (02:27):
I do?
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Yeah, but but good we don't want.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
To that's we're talking about.
Speaker 4 (02:34):
Yeah, I do, And I was trained as a as
a mathematician. My my graduate degrees in mathematics. I've got
a undergraduate degree in mathematics and computer science and classical
studies or classical Greek to be precise. And the reason
for that is I've always had a fascination with words
(02:54):
in every language. I grew up in a in a
multi ethnic house. My father was a He died earlier
this year at the age of one hundred. As an
emeritus professor of linguistics, he spoke forty languages.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Like that's InCred yes for zero.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
For zero, yes.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
He would every year he would learn a new language
during his professional career.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Where do you put that?
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Like in your head?
Speaker 1 (03:26):
Like, where is that brain? I would think, probably that's incredible.
Speaker 4 (03:30):
I think it's actually the second language that's the hardest
one to learn, because once you get your brain stretched
in the right way to speak two languages, or to
understand languages or to think in two different ways, then
it's flexible enough to get the rest of them.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
And if you sort of go overboard, then you end
up where my dad was.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
But I still don't know French.
Speaker 4 (03:51):
I'm not sure you can call yourself Canadian unless you
can at least read the side of.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
A serial boox.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
I can read some of it. Yeah, but I'm interrupting, apologize,
but I'm just like, I'm still stuck on forty.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
That's incredible.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
So anyway, my mom was Japanese and she was a
language instructor. She taught Japanese as a Japanese to Americans
and Canadians, and so we had like long discussions about
words over every meal as we were as I was
growing up, and that the dining room would be the
dining table would be stacked up high with dictionaries on
(04:25):
every corner, so we could grab a Japanese dictionary or
an English dictionary, or you know, an etymological dictionary or
a French or German one. And so I grew up
around dictionaries, and I really I wasn't sure what I
was going to do with my life. I thought mathematician,
but it's hard work and not enough money. In it
(04:45):
and software developers kind of fun. There's a little bit
of money in it. But the conversations that I enjoyed
most were the ones that I had really growing up
with my parents about what do these words mean? Why
do Japanese and English speakers look at the world so differently,
Like Japanese doesn't have the idea of plural or singular,
(05:06):
but English doesn't have the idea of showing respect to
people by the choice of your first person pronoun.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
What's up with those?
Speaker 4 (05:14):
So fast forward to about twenty years ago. I've lost
track now. I started playing Scrabble and I ended up I.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
Did that as being a lover of words right.
Speaker 4 (05:29):
In fact, I started playing scrabble seriously when I was
living in France because I found I was starting to
lose my English fluency. My Japanese fluency was fine because
I was sending facts is every week to my mom
to tell her how I was doing, and I was
having to write a lot more in Japanese my English.
It was a French language working environment, so I was
just gradually losing it, and I thought, oh, I can
play scrabble on this Nintendo game Boy, which kind of
(05:52):
dates whenever that was, and that'll keep my English fluency.
At least I'll be able to memorize all the two
and three letter words, which you know, that's the most
important part of any.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
Language, right as a scrabble player.
Speaker 4 (06:04):
So I come back home to continue my degree, and
I think I need to keep playing scrabble, So I
play online and then I find a local club, and
then I start running tournaments. Because the guy that was
running the Toronto Scrabble Club, which was the biggest and
oldest club in the world for scrabble. The guy that
was running, a guy named like Whi's passed away younger
(06:25):
than I am now. And they said, you seem like
someone who can organize things and keep them going, and
you're already doing all the stats.
Speaker 3 (06:32):
Can you run this club for us?
Speaker 4 (06:33):
And I said, sure, I am supposed to do my degree,
but he is sure, I guess if you insist. And
then they said that means you've got to run a
tournament next month, and I thought, really, that seems like
a lot of work. So I ran a tournament. They said, oh,
that was great. You should come to like Boston and
run a tournament there, and you should, you know, run
(06:54):
the national championships, go to Bangkok and run this tournament,
and you should run world championship.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
It's all over the place.
Speaker 4 (07:00):
And so I did that for many years, and I'm
still the head of the North American scrab Players Association,
and I still do an awful lot of stuff that's
scrabble related. But we haven't even really touched on the
subject of this interview yet.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
Oh no, we've got lots we've got If you've got time,
we got time by friend, So so wrap away, go
for it.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
We're good.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
Well he's got a degree togain.
Speaker 4 (07:23):
Clearly, so I anybody wants to talk about Metafabonacci sequences,
that's that's a whole separate interview as well. The So
a couple of years ago, I, uh, my wife, who's
who's a freelance copy copy editor. She noticed a job
(07:43):
posting at the Editor's Association of Canada that said they
were looking for someone to work on editing a Canadian
English dictionary. And I thought, huh, yeah, you know what,
it's been like twenty years since we had a new
update to the Canadian Oxford Dictionary and that's getting really dated.
And she just sort of gave me a ten minute
lecture on how being a professional editor in Canada as
(08:07):
impossible because you have to refer to a dictionary that's
twenty years old if you want to know how to
spell or describe something and things we use words very
differently now than we did twenty years ago, Like.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
I'll get back to that.
Speaker 4 (08:22):
But so then I thought, huh, you know what, as
the acting chair of the North American Scrabble Players Association
Dictionary Committee and ex officio editor of the North American
Scrabble Player's Word List, if I got in on the
inside with a group of people working on editing a
new dictionary, I could get new words into the Scrabble
(08:46):
Tournament lexicon so we could play them in scrabble competitions
faster than any other way, because I've usually had to
sort of wait for dictionaries to be printed and then
buy a copy and then get someone to read all
the way words in the dictionary and then type the
ones that we should be good in and scrabbled into
our scrabble database. And so I'm by thinking, if I'm
(09:06):
on the inside, that'll be great and I get to
talk about words with people that like like words. So
I think the only way I can do this is
to is to apply for the position. I'll say I
can do that. I can edit your dictionary, and I think,
you know, I probably could, because I edit the Scrabble Dictionary,
at least the Scrabble word list. And you know, I
(09:28):
know a lot about words, and I know one thing
I know about words is that you don't really you
don't go to school to become a lexicographer a dictionary writer.
It's a craft. It's something that you learn by doing.
And I've been doing it on an amateur basis for
a while. And I know I have lots of friends
with lexicographers, and they're really looking for someone more like
(09:48):
a project manager or a volunteer coordinator. And I've done
that for the last twenty years of my life. So
I could do that. So but I thought, but there's
a risk here. They might actually want me to do it,
and I don't want to do that because I've already
got these other jobs and my wife will kill me
if I take on another job. So I thought, hmmm,
(10:08):
I will do my best to present myself as poorly
as I can in this interview. I will just phone
it in, except, of course, at the zoom. So I
don't update my resume. I just go to LinkedIn. I
guess everybody that does this. Now, though I go to LinkedIn,
I hit export as pdf, I email it to them.
(10:29):
I don't I don't bother with the cover letter, and
so I show up. I show up at at this
zoom interview.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
Trace professional sir.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
Yeah, exactly. That's amazing.
Speaker 4 (10:39):
Well, there's a lot of work involved in not getting
a job. You know, really really don't want to get
a job.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
It's really difficult to not get the job. You take
all the boxes and you're just like, oh god, I
don know what to do.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
There's a lot of work in not getting a job.
That is amazing. I love it. That's fantastic.
Speaker 4 (10:59):
Would up there and there's the you know, the president
of the Editors Association and the Distinguished Professor of the
English Language and Linguistics from University of British Columbia and
professional LEXA coogoverers and all they're just set.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
To grill me. And I'm thinking, I don't want to
really look stupid. This is going to be a really
fine line to walk between, you.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
Know, not wanting the job, yeah, but not looking like
a dummy.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
Exact exactly. I don't want to succeed. I don't want
to fail.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
Yeah, you don't want your name out there like, oh,
don't hire this guy or anything. Yeah, yeah exactly.
Speaker 3 (11:31):
But thankfully or not.
Speaker 4 (11:34):
They led with, so we think you're the guy, and
they said, we really have not had any other serious candidates,
so just you know, we've booked this time to interview you.
Just go ahead and tell us how you would do this.
And so then I had to think on the fly
about you know, we actually how would you edit a dictionary?
And so I mean, obviously the reason that I'm talking
(11:55):
to you here is that they said, well, the job
is yours if you want to. And then I had
a long talk talk with my wife and she said,
what kind of a job is this? Is this sort
that pays money or and takes a lot of your time?
Is it the one where Stiper get a lot of
hate mail? And I said, uh, no, money upfront, money
down the road, hate mail. Eventually, down the road, it'll
(12:18):
come with the money. And so I waited a couple
of days and then eventually said, yeah, sure I'll do
this thing. But so the reason that it's difficult, the
reason that it hasn't been one in a little while.
I'm going to sort of give you a two minute
history of Canadian lexicography. First of all, what is Canadian English?
Speaker 3 (12:41):
Like?
Speaker 4 (12:42):
Do we actually have Canadian Is there such a thing
as Canadian English? It's hard to say, As with anything Canadian,
our first stab at defining what something that is Canadian
is by saying it's something it's not American right. If
the Americans spell it without the youth, then we spell
it with the you American spell at er, we spell
it right. But you can't. You can't define things it
(13:06):
by negatives. The other big issue with defining what Canadian
is English is is that Newfoundland English. Is that the
same as the English that they speak in downtown Montreal
or the English that they speak in suburban Toronto. No,
these are all very different things. Is the English that
they speak in the far North the same? No, that
(13:26):
everybody speaks with a different set of words, with a
different set of pronunciations either. So it's a little bit
takes some uncharacteristically un Canadian gall to sort of set
yourself as the arbiter of what is Canadian English. Thankfully,
I've developed a fairly thick skin from editing the Scrabble Dictionary,
(13:47):
so I'm ready for that part.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
But so.
Speaker 4 (13:53):
The idea of having a Canadian dictionary in the first
place was not a Canadian idea. It was, of course
an American idea. And there was this guy named Charles
Lovell who in the ninety he was he's actually worth.
I need to do a YouTube video about him or something.
He left home as a teenager. He was a literal hobo.
(14:16):
He rode the rails, going from library to library to
research words, and eventually decided that he needed to do
something with all of his knowledge, and he got hired
by an American lexicographer to research americanisms, words that were
original to America in the United States. And while he
was doing this, he noticed that a lot of words
(14:38):
that they were putting into this dictionary that he was
working on were actually canadianisms, but the Americans were taking
credit for it, and this bothered him, so he came up.
He went on a trip up north to meet with
some Canadian linguists and said, what is your problem. This
is in the nineteen fifties. He said, what is your problem?
Why don't you have a dictionary of your own? Britain's
got Oxford and and other dictionaries, and the United States
(15:02):
at that point had probably half a dozen.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
Different good dictionaries, including Marion Webster.
Speaker 4 (15:07):
He came up here and said, why are you letting
the Americans tell you what your language is, or.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
Even say that it's their language?
Speaker 4 (15:14):
And so that led to like a ten to fifteen
year project that culminated in nineteen sixty seven, the Canadian
Centennial year, with the first series of series Canadian dictionaries
published by what was then the Gauge Publishing Company, and
those ended up being in schools everywhere. If you have
a certain age, you'll remember the Big Engage Dictionary. And
(15:37):
then as soon as one of them was published, well,
it's sort of a familiar Canadian story. But other publishers thought,
other American based publishers especially thought oh, well, we could
make some money off of that, and so they started
taking American dictionaries and then sort of sprinkling a little
bit of maple syrup on them and shipping them up
north so that they could sell.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
Them as Canadian dictionaries.
Speaker 4 (15:59):
And this sort of went on until the end of
the end of the last millennium, when Oxford Oxford University
Press in particular, said we'll show you guys how to
do it right. It's it's this is clearly you know,
you've got a bunch of Americans and a cup and
some Canadian hosers basically who have no idea what they're
(16:19):
doing editing dictionaries. You don't have the scholarship or credentials
to do it. We will show you how it's done.
And they came in and they produced, you know, two editions.
Captain Barbera produced two lovely editions of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary,
and then sadly she died.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
But before she.
Speaker 4 (16:35):
Died, the Oxford University Press realized a fundamental fact about
dictionaries in the century, which is you can't make money
with them. It's it's not a commercial activity because the
dictionary takes millions of dollars because they're just they're really
labor intensive because you've got to research every word, and
(16:56):
the words change faster than you can research them, so
you have to have a large number of people. You
need volunteers, but you also need just it's just they're gigantic,
thankless projects, and if you try to if you try
to run them as commercial enterprises, you'll fail. And everybody
decided that over the course of the first decade in
(17:19):
the century, which is why we have no dictionaries anymore.
But so the editors need a dictionary, They're not the
only ones that need a dictionary. I mean, I would
argue that everybody who reads or writes in English and
Canada probably would benefit from having a dictionary. They would
benefit from having a Canadian English dictionary being licensed to
(17:40):
the major tech companies, so that when you select which dictionary,
you're auto correcting to a Canadian rather than US.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
Or that's or UK. That's right. The only place I
know that actually does that is YouTube. YouTube actually has
a selection where it says English, American or Canadian.
Speaker 3 (17:56):
So Americans really don't get that.
Speaker 4 (18:00):
They say, you know, can't you just choose between you
k The one example that is usually is often given
is if I go to the Costco in Toronto, and
Costco is an American chain. If I go to the
tire center at the Costco, I will see a sign
there that can only appear in Canada because it'll spell
tire t I r E the American way and it'll
spell center ce n tre. The British way, tire would
(18:24):
be with a y in England and center would be er.
So although those individual spellings I say that they're from
other countries, that phrase tire center is a purely Canadian
thing that would not make sense anywhere else. And yet
if there isn't a dictionary to tell you that, then
it's just word of mouth. And if you're trying to
(18:44):
edit at something or write something, if we don't do
this right now, we will eventually end up in a
world where Canadians are speaking nothing but or reading and
writing and communicating in only sort of AI approved American English.
So it's a critical moment to be doing it.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
Oh good for you and honestly good for all of
you to to be doing this. I do have a
word that I actually wanted to run by you because
I know that it's said differently in different parts of
the country. How many people are involved in this project.
Speaker 4 (19:15):
Well, we've got about a dozen people. It's fewer, a
lot fewer than you would think. We have about a
dozen people that I meet with by zoom over the
course of the course of a week. We have an
editorial meeting and then a general meeting. We have a
sign up on our on our website, Canadian Canadian English
Dictionary dot ca right now for volunteers, and we've had
(19:37):
over fifty people volunteer. In fact, fifty is kind of
too many people to volunteer, so I've had I had
to choose one of them to be the volunteer coordinator.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Right, I'm going to have to put my wife in
touch with you, because she's like a literally a logo
file like my wife is literally, Like my wife is literally,
you know, she's she's literally she would love so anyway, sorry.
Speaker 4 (19:58):
So we we are primarily looking for people that can
help with the early stages of developing a dictionary this
but and I'll tell you what we're doing is that
by the end of the year, we hope to have
all of the words and phrases that start with the
letter Q defined. We started with letter Q, which is
an unusual choice for a dictionary because it's a short
section of the dictionary, but it's a meaningful section of
(20:20):
the dictionary. So, and it's also one who's that has
changed a lot over the course of the last twenty years.
We lost Queen Elizabeth, So anything any phrase like the
queen's printer or Queen's Council that an as an obsolete definition.
We've had a lot of We've had geographical terms. If
you're on the West Coast, you know, it's not the
Queen Charlotte Islands Islands anymore. It's the High to Guai.
(20:45):
If you think about words like queer or queen, the
situations in which you can say those and the reaction
to using those words, say in a dark alley in
downtown Toronto are very different now from what they were
twenty years ago, right And there's also you know, there's
(21:06):
a lot of Indigenous origin words. I'm in a long
running debate right now as to whether or not the
word kayak should be spelled ka y a k or
qa j a q, which is more authentic to people
from the far North. And then they're just things that
ideas that didn't exist twenty years ago, like quad copter
(21:28):
for a drone, or quad mester if you had to
go beyond the semester system because you're because your school
system was cohorted during the pandemic, stuff like that, so
we chose a letter Q. We're busily trying to define
all of the words, and while we do that, we're
developing our best practices, developing a series of guides to
(21:52):
how to define words for the little guideans through the
rest of the dictionary, and developing their processes for that.
We're looking for people who have a knack for defining words,
which is really difficult to identify. Actually you want I
think we want more people like technical writers than creatives
for that, because just the idea of how to precisely
(22:15):
define something in a way that doesn't exclude things that
aren't part of it, but includes everything that can be
part of it.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
Yeah, because you're not looking necessarily for like fictional writers.
You're looking more for like actual, concrete, evidential. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4 (22:32):
And also we want people that have for the for
the defining part. We need people that are that don't
have big egos about their knowledge of English, because everybody
will find if they look up a word like in books,
dot Google dot com, or in a dictionary, they'll find
(22:52):
that it's used in ways that they personally would not
use it, that they might not have heard it being used.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
So you take the word like.
Speaker 4 (23:01):
Quiz quiz for example, a quiz its meaning has changed
a lot over the past one hundred years thanks to
the influence of quiz shows it really means right now
to sort of like a pop quiz, a test of
your knowledge.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
Right.
Speaker 4 (23:13):
It used to mean like an eccentric person, and people
don't use it that much. But so then there's a
question does it belong in the dictionary? Well, yes, because
one of the purposes a dictionary is to help people
understand older texts. Basically, any word that they might be
encountering as a modern Canadian, they might want to look
(23:33):
it up in a dictionary to say what was this
person talking about? And there are still people that were
born like a long time ago who are write using
the language of a long time ago. So you know,
there's that. The next step beyond definers is we need
people to edit that, and those we have a lot
of because you know, we started off with the Editors
(23:55):
Association at least forty of the fifty people or editors,
and they're saying, we're happy to things, but we don't
want to want to come up with new things, you know,
come up with new.
Speaker 3 (24:03):
Content beyond that the usual.
Speaker 4 (24:07):
The usual needs that an organization has people to do
interviews like this, people to push our social media, people
to to organize things. I mean, we just only at
the beginning of this month, managed to get ourselves incorporated,
and we've got to go down the process of setting
ourselves up as a charity.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
Got old incorporation. Oh yes.
Speaker 4 (24:28):
But basically, if if you, if you like words, there's
almost certainly something that you could do to help us
with our project.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
So that's that is super I just I just sent
it to you, Derek.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
I want I want everybody to know.
Speaker 4 (24:44):
Sorry, sorry, sorry, Canadian English Dictionary dot c a's it.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
So I want to ask you about about a word. Yeah,
so am I Actually this is you are just properly awesome. Okay,
So there's a word that I know. I'm a musician.
Derek is a musician as well. And if I was
to go on tour all throughout Canada in the sort
of the central and on the West coast, I'm going
(25:14):
on tour on the East coast, I'm going on tour.
So I'm wondering, like words like that, how do you
end up kind of getting them into a dictionary and
sort of having the definition of of what it is?
You know, And you know, obviously there's things like a
(25:34):
golf tour, so there's all sorts of different types of tours.
But how do you again also show the different pronunciations
of the words.
Speaker 4 (25:46):
So dictionaries not to get two technical, but the dictionaries
traditionally have two different ways of expressing pronunciations. They've got
what's called the International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA, which is
used everywhere outside of the United States, and they have
so called spelling systems where you where you spell a
spell a made up word that, if pronounced by a
(26:08):
typical speaker might come out sounding the way you want
the word to be pronounced.
Speaker 3 (26:12):
And you can.
Speaker 4 (26:13):
Probably tell that I'm leaning more towards the former rather
than the latter. There's more subtlety to it. The reason
that I prefer IPA is that one of the major
groups of people that are interested in their dictionary is
first generation immigrants to Canada who are native speakers of English.
(26:33):
That is to say, people who have come here from
other English speaking parts of the world. But notice that
when they speak their English every now and then people
have no idea what they're talking about, talking.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
About or.
Speaker 4 (26:48):
Or or people just stop and look at them funny
and say, you're not from around here? Are so for them?
Everybody outside of North America is used to the IPA,
so it would be I think a good place to
start for our for our online dictionary.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
We do I p A.
Speaker 4 (27:03):
We will eventually early on have automatically generated audio versions
because it's easy to convert IPA to audio, and probably
at some point we will do some sort of respelling
system just because there's a lot of demand for it
from people who grew up with those. But uh, you know,
as I said, you don't get an you don't get
(27:25):
accuracy when you do respelling.
Speaker 3 (27:28):
Systems, So I uh yeah, I'm not I'm not keen
on those. Mind you, This doesn't really answer the question.
Speaker 4 (27:36):
That's sort of underlying the premise of your Crest question,
which was the tour versus tour distinction, and that basically
we have to do it past lex lexic cogrovers have done,
which is, we pick one variety of Canadian English to
privilege over others, and then we explain how the others
(27:58):
differ from that in some front matters. So typically the
main pronunciation will be given as tour. That is to say,
we would probably be using a h an educated urban
variety of Central Canadian English, so that is to say,
(28:18):
the way it's spoken actually not even necessarily central, So
the way the way English is spoken in why educating
people in downtown Toronto or downtown Vancouver, or downtown Winnipeg,
downtown Calgary, not Montreal, because there's significant differences to the
language there, and and then there'd be in the front
(28:40):
matter to the dictionary when it's eventually published, or in
an article on the blog when it's eventually created, will
be explanations of how the how the phonology difference differs
from one part of the country to another, and how
you know, if you want to sound sound like you're
from down east, you need to, you know, say tour
and not tour.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
Yeah, yes, I I'm still stuck on forty. But I'm like,
I'm still like continuously losing it every time you say.
Speaker 5 (29:08):
Something else, and I'm like, I'm like, this is like,
this is the most this is the most fascinating thing,
and like the thing like the i'm i'm, I'm I'm
never I love I love broken English.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
I love it right because it tells me. It Broken
English tells me that you you this isn't your first English,
isn't your first language, which means you speak another language,
and that fascinates the crap out of me because I
have the hardest time learning anything. My family's from Denmark
and I don't. I don't speak Danish. I don't. My
(29:44):
my youngest sister speaks Danish, my younger brother speaks Danish,
and my my parents speak Danish, and my grandparents spoke Danish,
but I don't.
Speaker 3 (29:55):
It's no idea what.
Speaker 4 (29:57):
It's a difficult language to learn to pronounce because the
speech sounds sound more like respiratory illness to English speakers.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
It's true, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 (30:16):
The so what you say, what you say is right,
that that that there are so many different varieties of
English being spoken in Canada because of the because you know,
half the people in Toronto are from born born outside
of Canada. My mother used to say that she thought
Toronto would be a good place to improve her English skills,
and it turned out to be the worst place in
(30:36):
the world because people are way too tolerant here of
any type of English. Because you know, people with thick
Chinese accents have to be able to communicate to do
business with people with thick South Asian accents, and they
use English as the as the lingua franca because that's
what that's what everybody here in theory speaks. But you'll
never hear anybody here correcting someone else's English.
Speaker 3 (30:58):
I mean, unless they're an editor.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
So the other thing, they don't say something like that's absolutely.
Speaker 4 (31:03):
Wrong, well, or or if they say something that indicates
they're they're an American.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
So that's that's another category.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
We nail into the wall.
Speaker 3 (31:11):
Yeah, they can talk that way up here. We don't.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
We don't say stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (31:17):
My daddy, my dad, who was born in the United
States and moved here actually as ah shortly shortly after
I was born, said one of the hardest habits for
an American to stop saying, to stop using linguistically was
the phrase in this country.
Speaker 3 (31:35):
And he, like Americans tend to.
Speaker 4 (31:37):
Say, well in this country, we don't do that, regardless
of what country there they happened to be in. And
that's something that really creates on Canadian actually everywhere everywhere
around the world. That creates some people's nerves when Americans
do that. The I wanted to go back to the
volunteer thing. One area the so so so much to
(32:02):
talk about. In addition to the Editors Association, we're partnered
with something called the Canadian English Lab at UBC run
by Professor ste Stephen Dalonger, and also with the Strathi
Unit of STRATH the English Unit at Queen's University Queen's
University Edits or the Stratha unit there has created something
called the Canadian English Corpus, where corpus is a linguistics
(32:26):
term for collection of a representative sample of all of
the all of the uses of a language, a large
sampling of a language that people can study to figure
out what exactly is Canadian English. So they're in the
process of updating their Canadian English Corpus to serve as
a as a foundation for our dictionary. And one of
the things that they're doing right now is that they're
(32:47):
actively recruiting people writers, player rights and authors and so
on who want to contribute content to the Corpus for
research purposes. And then actually, one thing that one thing
that I really liked about the Gauge Dictionary is the
frequency with which they use examples, because there's nothing better
(33:09):
than an example to illustrate to someone who isn't familiar
with the word how you how you should how a
word is actually used. And so we're looking for people
who are writers, authors, playwrights, poets who are willing to
(33:30):
let us quote from their work as examples of.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
Ideal or typical Canadian English.
Speaker 4 (33:37):
So if you've already done the writing right, if you've
already done the writing, we don't expect you to do
it again in the form of the definition. But if
you think you've written a look that is, you know,
the Great Canadian novel and it's got some interesting uses,
especially of words starting with the letter Q, then please
get in touch with.
Speaker 3 (33:55):
Us and we'll be happy to to use yours.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
Well, that's so, that's so cool. You were talking about
there being a million things to talk about, but in
regards to, you know, recruiting new people and people to
help out with this, is there anything else that you
can think of as far as as far as you know,
any other help that you can think of that you
(34:20):
might need.
Speaker 4 (34:21):
We're getting close to the point where we will be
making a financial appeal and that little go up on
our website and.
Speaker 3 (34:26):
You'll hear about it when we do.
Speaker 4 (34:28):
At this point, I've really been touched by the amount,
by the amount of volunteer labor and in kind contributions
that we've had when we've had to pay people.
Speaker 3 (34:37):
It's come out of people's university grant money.
Speaker 4 (34:39):
But mostly people if I tell them, you know, if
you wanted to find a few words, eventually I'll put
you on the payroll. They'll say, here, have a dozen definitions,
or you know, everybody that's been working on the project
so far, including myself, has been doing so entirely pro
bono because we think, you know, we believe strongly that
something that the country needs to help maintain our sense
(35:02):
of national identity.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
Oh.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
Absolutely. I've got a couple of questions here for you.
Do you have a favorite set of reference books, or
a favorite dictionary, or a favorite etymological dictionary or anything
like that. Is there anything that stands out that you
think to yourself, I loved it when I read that
back in the day.
Speaker 4 (35:23):
The second question is, yeah, I'm going I'm going to
possibly upset some people, but because I have a lot
of friends that work at Merriam Webster, the dictionary company.
But my favorite dictionary growing up was the Webster's New
World Dictionary, which was one of their major competitors, and
the reason that it was my favorite was that they
(35:45):
gave very detailed etymologies.
Speaker 3 (35:48):
Or word origins for all of their words.
Speaker 4 (35:51):
And you could look up any word and it would
tell you this goes back to Old English word this,
and French that and Latin back all the way back
to Proto into Europe and roots.
Speaker 3 (36:01):
And it's just.
Speaker 4 (36:02):
A lot of work to do that, and I don't
think we'll get there in my lifetime for the Canadian
English dictionary, but etymologies were a big part of my
life growing up, so that was definitely my favorite.
Speaker 2 (36:15):
Nice go ahead, Derek, Okay, so we have your favorite dictionary.
So Sir Ben Kingsley was asked live on air at
once what his favorite word in the English language was
and he came out with an expletive, which I'm refraining
from saying, good for you, Derek, because I want to
(36:36):
upset the army prits. But it started with an aff
and didn't say fire truck. Okay, what so in the
in the in the in the in the in the
vein of what we're talking about about your your Canadian
English dictionary today, what would be like for you would
(36:59):
be the ultimate like your your your top gear, like Canadian,
this is a Canadian word, and and like no like
no one else can claim this, this is a Canadian
word and this is where it sits.
Speaker 1 (37:14):
I could think of a coman.
Speaker 4 (37:19):
So Professor Stephen Dollinger at the University of British Columbia
HASS He's written a book about canadianisms and he edits
a work that's going to be a big contributor to
ours called the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, and
it is an online catalog of every word that is
a Canadianism and being a being a good Austrian academic,
(37:42):
He's sub categorized canadianisms according to whether they are Canadian
and origin.
Speaker 3 (37:48):
I'm not going to be able to get the whole list.
Speaker 4 (37:50):
Canadian and origin Canadian because we kept them after kept
the word after everybody else started to stop using it Canadian,
because we changed the meaning Canadian, because it has this
meaning to us that is positive, Canadian because it has
a special meaning to us that is negative.
Speaker 3 (38:05):
And there's one more, but I don't know what it is.
Speaker 4 (38:08):
The uh And just reading through his dictionary is just
such as a It's a collection of rabbit holes that
take you into our into our history. You learn things
that you don't want to know, you learn things that
you do want to know. You learn I think I
think the first one that it came across in the
(38:29):
letter researching the letter Q was the phrase quadruped snowshoe,
and I was thinking, what the heck is that and
what would you need it for? A quadruped snowshoe is
a bag of hay that you tie onto the bottom
onto the bottom of a mule's foot when you're trying
(38:49):
to get it to drag stuff out of a mine
in the mountains in BC in the nineteenth century. And
I was thinking, yeah, so, okay, there's that one of
your In your chat, someone is asking about the word kayak.
Kayak is an interesting question because, as I said earlier,
do you spell it k a y a K or
(39:09):
q a j a q? And I would rather spell
it q a j a q, And I would rather
pluralize it kayak eight q a j A I T.
Except that a kayak doesn't necessarily mean what is known
as a kayak in the far North. Here in England
or the United States, they put motors on kayaks and
(39:31):
sales on kayaks and build them out of fiberglass, and
they make things that I don't think are kayaks, but
maybe kayak's with a K.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
That's just weird.
Speaker 4 (39:42):
There's there's a word that I found that was missing
from the from the Dictionary of Canadianisms, which came up
actually in a conversation with a group of Jane Sibbery
or last week's guests UH support team last week, which
was the word haw eater h A w e A
(40:02):
t e R haw eater, haw eater. That is purely Canadian.
It's actually a very local Canadian word. It's only found
in one part. Would you care to guess what a
haw eater is?
Speaker 2 (40:14):
I want to know where it's from.
Speaker 3 (40:18):
It is from what region?
Speaker 2 (40:20):
What region you're talking about?
Speaker 4 (40:21):
It is from the largest island in a lake in
the world. Oh Jesus, And that island, if you're a
geographical trivia fan, also has the largest lake on an island.
It goes down to this, got the largest island on
a lake on an island on a lake.
Speaker 2 (40:39):
Yeah, yeah, interesting.
Speaker 4 (40:42):
It's the island in question is Manitoulin Island, and a
haw eater refers to someone who was born on Manitulin
Island really where they have hawberries that are a traditional
source of vitamin C.
Speaker 3 (40:54):
So I don't know.
Speaker 4 (40:56):
For me, it's always whatever. The most recent word that
I've that I've come across us. That is, uh, the
one that comes to mind first before this, The word
that I was struggling to define for the dictionary was
the word I'm going to pronounce it and then spell it.
Speaker 3 (41:13):
I pronounced it co hog.
Speaker 4 (41:16):
And it can be spelled c O H O G,
but I prefer to spell it because it's more points
in scrabble.
Speaker 3 (41:24):
Q U A h A U.
Speaker 1 (41:27):
G so h a U G.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
Yeah, a lot of letters.
Speaker 3 (41:34):
So and he guesses what a co hog is?
Speaker 2 (41:37):
Uh, I have no idea. I know it's where family
guys place, right right.
Speaker 4 (41:47):
It is there, you go, okay and uh. So it's
a word that comes from Rhode Island and it refers
to a type of a type of clam.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
It's said that right after she's it's a sea creature.
Speaker 4 (42:04):
It is one of the types of shells that was
used by First Nations peoples in the United States to
create what we call wamp them. It is still used
as a it's what you make clam chowder out of
it if you're in New England.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
Nice.
Speaker 4 (42:22):
But it's actually the more you delve into it, the
more complicated it gets. Because biologists divide cohogs into three
different species, two of which are related, and the third
one isn't they all sort of look the same. But
then you try to think, how am I going to
explain this in a dictionary definition that's shorter than an
(42:43):
encyclopedia entry, And so far I've gotten it down to
like twenty lines, but I really want to get it
down to five lines. But the more you read about
any specific thing, the harder it is to leave information out.
So like, there's this one type of cohog called the
ocean cohog, which is found mainly an ice Iceland and
the like the northern Atlantic. It's known for the fact
(43:06):
that there was a co hog that was harvested maybe
ten years ago. They knew that co hogs lived to
be to ridiculously old ages long they had long lives.
They dissected one and did a scanning electron micross could
be thing with its shell and found that it was
(43:27):
five hundred years old, and it set the record for
the longest lived life form animal in the world whose
age had been precisely determined. So I'm thinking that's more
trivia and more encyclopedic than dictionary. But now that I've
heard this and now that I also know that you
can get ocean co hogs in Canada, how can I not?
(43:50):
I know, I'll put it in a usage example. Did
you know ocean co hogs are? So that's probably the
way that it'll end up, but I'm going to pull
that out of party.
Speaker 1 (43:59):
And of course it ends up being in the Q section,
which you're working really hard on anyway, So yeah, perfect, right,
right now?
Speaker 2 (44:08):
What was the first What was the first when you
when you started when you started in? What was the
first word Q?
Speaker 3 (44:13):
The letter Q? Which is which is? Which is difficult
on its own.
Speaker 4 (44:16):
Actually I looked at the letter Q and I thought, no,
this is going to be for the second past through
because it's hard to define the letter Q as an abbreviation,
as a letter. It's scientific uses. You end up going
into deep philosophical territory when you say, what's the difference
(44:38):
between when you say Q, do you mean the letter
as it's printed on a piece of paper or the
sound that you think it makes or the arbitrary con
concept of the seventh Q is the.
Speaker 3 (44:54):
Seventeenth seventeenth letter of a sequence? Right?
Speaker 4 (44:57):
If you label things A, B, C, D, E, F,
G and Z on or do you mean something that
is abbreviated to Q, like a question or a queen
or that sort of thing. So it's just it was
too complicated an entry, so I decided I was going
to jump over to something much easier to define, and
then discovered that nothing is really easy to define if
(45:17):
you look at it closely enough. Yeah, and that was
something that actually the professional Lexa coggoverers that I worked
with reminded me of time and again, which is that
if you want to actually get a dictionary written, you
need to develop the skills to avoid falling into the
rabbit holes and figure out, you know, conciseness, which clearly
(45:38):
is not my forte forty seven forty five minutes into
a half hour interview.
Speaker 1 (45:42):
Yeah, no, exactly. No. Hey, listen, like I said, we're good,
So if you're good, we're good. I wanted to I
wanted to ask you if there is a word that
kind of as that you've been going through and doing
all of this incredible work that you and your team
are doing. Is there a word that all of you
just kind of were like, I can't believe I forgot
(46:05):
that word is completely like looney or something like. Is
there something that you all were just like, oh my goodness, yeah,
I can't believe that on hell right.
Speaker 4 (46:14):
Well there was there was actually surprising omission from like
so when we when we the very first step in
defining a section of words is deciding which words you're
going to include, and it has to be an approximation
at first. But I mean, first we look at the
at our predecessor in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, and we
see what words they looked at. And then we look
(46:35):
at the Gauge Dictionary because it has a different sort
of editorial policy. We'll look at Merriam Webster's online publications
to see what's been what's current.
Speaker 3 (46:44):
I do searches through.
Speaker 4 (46:48):
Any documents that I can get my hands on from
the corpus, including the staff at several of the hancered
public handsred offices at legislatures across the country have been
very helpful in providing legislative records that that I can
scan through, so I look for new words. And that
was how it came across things like the modern sense
of the word quad, uh, quad shair. Actually there's a
(47:12):
bunch of there's a bunch of quad words that quad
has become a more productive prefix than it used to be.
Speaker 3 (47:16):
But anyway, so.
Speaker 4 (47:19):
The you look at all these words and and you
also keep an eye out as you're working on the
letter queue for you know, in conversation, did someone use
a word? Because when when you if you've been staring
at a few thousand Q words for several months, if
someone uses a word that is not in your in
that list, you'll you'll realize right away. There's a excellent episode.
(47:45):
Actually I'll get back to No, I'm actually I can
digress into that. There's a Are you familiar with the
comedy series black Adder by Rowan Atkinson?
Speaker 1 (47:53):
Yes, yeah, very much so.
Speaker 2 (47:55):
Yeah, black Adder like a bird that swallowed a plate.
Speaker 4 (47:59):
Have you watched the do you recall the episode where
the lexicographer appears and uh and Blackadder starts using he
just starts making up words to drive the lexicographer insane
because thinks that he's completed his work and.
Speaker 3 (48:17):
He just starts making up ridiculous for it is expl
what did you say? How do you spell that? So?
Speaker 4 (48:25):
And I thought he was I thought he was just
you know, having fun, But it turns out no, if
you've actually spent a lot of time studying a set
of words, and then someone uses a word that you
know should have been on that list that is not.
It just sets off alarm bells in your head. So
the most reasonable one of that of that sort that
I found was I was really surprised that none of
(48:46):
our uh, like, the Canadian Oxford Dictionary does not list
Queen's University as as an entry. Oh wow, you think
major Canadian institution like that. They list the the New
York City Borough of Queens, but not Queen's University. And
you're thinking that's a really strange bias.
Speaker 1 (49:06):
That wow, so weird. Always always American, right, always American.
Speaker 2 (49:15):
Maybe you don't like dan Ackroyd.
Speaker 3 (49:17):
It's it's an illustration of how.
Speaker 4 (49:21):
It's uh, it's it's difficult. No, it's it's impossible to
get it one hundred percent right. Which is why I
look at the project as being an ongoing, sustainable one.
And this is something that I made in my original
pitch to the Editor's Association. I said, we're building something
that's going to be around, I hope for decades, if
not centuries. We're building we want to build the Canadian
(49:43):
equivalent to the Oxford English Dictionary. I mean, if you're
going to be ambitious, you might as well aim for
the sky. But yes, we want something that's going to
be updated on a regular basis. And the good thing
about updating things on a regular basis is that you
can never be be justly accused of being incomplete. You
can just say, oh, Queen's University, that'll be in the
(50:05):
next edition, don't don't worry about it. So, so languages
is continuously evolving, right. There are words that that people
use this year that they weren't using last year, or
that they've changed the meanings of.
Speaker 3 (50:16):
So it is something that we have to be constantly
on the lookout for.
Speaker 1 (50:19):
This has been the coolest freaking interview that we've done,
and like, honest to god, so straight up honest, I'm like,
I'm really like, I'm not a I'm not a brainiac, right,
I'm just I'm not one of those guys. If you
ask me anything about like, you know, who recorded you know,
the the Beatles Rubber Soul album in nineteen sixty five,
I could tell you easily. But you know what I mean,
(50:42):
there's certain things that I'm very knowledgeable about, and I'll
be straight up honest with you. I was kind of
a little intimidated after seeing like your LinkedIn page and
seeing you know this, like seeing everything, kind of a
little intimidated, but you are just so freaking cool. Like, well,
my wife and I we just to sell really quickly.
(51:02):
My wife and I every Sunday night, at eight pm
Eastern Standard time, do a little thing we play. We
play called Radier Games. Don't say it, Derek. We play
reindeer games at eight pm every Sunday night. And my
wife is just the creator of all the content she does.
We do a madlib every week, right, because she loves
she writes some of the best mad libs you've ever
(51:23):
seen in your life. Right, And she asked me, you know,
like I feel good when I'm like, oh, you know,
I can I can give you a transitive verb or
an intransitive verb, like you know, things like that. Right.
So it's just it's so much fun. But anyway, the
cum quats are awesome. That's our friend Angela. She actually
joined us on that program quite often. I should get
you to play with us. That would be freaking wicked.
(51:45):
We got to get you on Reindeer Games, for sure.
Speaker 3 (51:48):
I'm happy to ye.
Speaker 1 (51:49):
Oh my god, that would be a there should actually,
if I could figure out a way to do like
an online scrabble thing, I'm sure that we know by.
Speaker 2 (51:59):
The way, Raindear games where you win absolutely nothing, not
even the adoration of your friends.
Speaker 1 (52:04):
That's right, it's very funny. Derek Lewis and I made
fun of you on one hundred episode with that. We'll
talk to John about that later. But anyway, listen, is
there is there anything else that you want to share
with us? Is there anything that as far as like
addresses or anything like that that you want to let
people know where they can join, where they can help you.
Speaker 3 (52:26):
No, I'm good things.
Speaker 4 (52:27):
So I think just the website that's got contact information,
has got a form people can fill out if they
want to be on our mailing list and so on.
Speaker 1 (52:34):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2 (52:37):
That is great. Like that is just so cool to
like to be able to be like I think that's
really neat, to be able to be part like to
be part of of like something historical like that, like
actually have like like and not like you know, fanfare
and ticker table braides or anything, but to be able
to be like, oh uh, you know poutine. I defined poutine.
Speaker 4 (53:01):
Yeah, it is literally meaningful work.
Speaker 2 (53:06):
Yeah, that's grid.
Speaker 1 (53:08):
That is absolutely brilliant what you just said. That's literally
that's got to be your slogan, my friend, we have
the most meaningful work.
Speaker 4 (53:18):
I have to write that down because I just I
just thought of it, right. I think it's going to
be our our slogan.
Speaker 1 (53:24):
And your friends A Canadian as heck helped you get there.
Just kidding. It was all you.
Speaker 3 (53:29):
It was totally all you.
Speaker 2 (53:30):
The Canadian English Dictionary where you could win absolutely nothing.
Speaker 1 (53:34):
Not adoration of yours, John Chew. This has been an
absolute pleasure, my friend. We we want to thank our good,
our dear friend Jane Sibbery for making this happen. So Jane,
thank you so much. And John, I am going to
talk to you if you if you don't mind about
reindeer games. I would love to get you on some
(53:55):
time because that would be so much fun and you
don't have to worry about the ethernet and all that stuff.
The way that you're the way that you're on right
now is perfect. Okay, So we'll have some fun with that.
But this has been an amazing interview. Thank you so
much for your time, and we are going to spin
from bound by the beauty back in nineteen eighty nine.
We're going to spend a beautiful tune for you by
(54:16):
your friend James Sibbery called Hockey. So again, thank you
so much for your time, John all the best, Thanks
so much, have a great night.
Popular Podcasts
Fudd Around And Find Out
UConn basketball star Azzi Fudd brings her championship swag to iHeart Women’s Sports with Fudd Around and Find Out, a weekly podcast that takes fans along for the ride as Azzi spends her final year of college trying to reclaim the National Championship and prepare to be a first round WNBA draft pick. Ever wonder what it’s like to be a world-class athlete in the public spotlight while still managing schoolwork, friendships and family time? It’s time to Fudd Around and Find Out!
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.