The weather report on teh interwebs suckered me in yesterday. It said 21, which I recognize as being top down temperature. For the next day it said 22, and going up each day after that for the next week, which I thought was too good to be true for this time of year.
I went outside in my shirtsleeves to take off the top for my drive to work, only to find it rather chilly. I scurried back inside to double check the weather report and my thermometer mounted by my window, only to realize that I had mistaken the dates for the temperature.
Those words shouldn’t (as those are not typically “raised” because they don’t precede an unvoiced consonant). But a word like “about” or “house” would. The idea many people have is that Canadians raise all “ow”-type sounds (it doesn’t really matter how they’re spelled, but I can’t think of any “ow” words off the top of my head followed by an unvoiced consonant), when that is not the case.
Yes. Rhetorical question. “That was a good Habs game, eh?” “I’ve got too much maple syrup on my beavertail, eh?” “The large poutine is too much, eh?” “Wayne Gretzky is the greatest player ever, eh?”
[li]Hoover has been kleenexed and aspirined. Except Aspirin is still trademarked (but you can’t hear that in their voice).[/li][/QUOTE]
“Hoovering” to mean vacuuming is certainly not very common in Canada. I only hear people from overseas, or maybe their kids, use this term.
[QUOTE]
[li]They always have to pay Hydro bills (and Ontario Hydro hasn’t even exist since sometime in the 90s)[/li][/QUOTE]
There’s still a “Hydro One.” Ontario Hydro was broken into Hydro One and OPG, and the former is the one people still usually deal with, (though I personally absolutely detest the word “hydro” for electricity.)
My favourite little Canadianism is the propensity to say the word “during” as if it starts with a J, “juring,” or maybe “djuring.” Most Canadians don’t even realize they’re saying it, but it’s very common.
In the US, Hoovering as vacuuming survives mostly via the metaphor of vacuuming a lot of food into your mouth–“He really Hoovered that dessert buffet”. If you were to say, “I Hoovered the living room” . . . well, I’d know what you meant, but I’d think of it as a kind of weird and antiquated usage.
There are quite a few call centers in Canada that handle customer service calls for US companies. I can usually spot the Canadians after a few sentences. It’s not so much the pronunciation of the phonemes, but the lilt and rhythm of the sentence. Hard to explain, but one clue if often the way the slightly stress the last syllable, not rising, but just stressed a bit. The way the Irish do it.
I’m in the US. A few of my friends still occasionally use cocaine, and they talk about hoovering up a line. When I hear “hoover” that’s what comes to mind.
