A delightful dictionary for Canadian English

From the New Yorker: A Delightful Dictionary for Canadian English.

A new musical opened on Broadway last week, “Come from Away,” about Gander, a small town in Newfoundland that rallied to care for some seven thousand travellers stuck there after their planes were grounded in the aftermath of 9/11. The play celebrates a variety of Canadian habits and customs, of which seemingly compulsive niceness is the main focus. But it also incorporates a wide range of vocabulary specific to Newfoundland or Canada in general, starting with the play’s odd title, a term used in the Atlantic provinces to refer to an outsider.

You won’t find “come from away” or “screech-in”—a mock ceremony depicted in the musical that confers Newfoundland “citizenship,” featuring extreme drunkenness and the osculation of a raw cod—in the Oxford English Dictionary. But the scholarly and scrappy second edition of the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (D.C.H.P.-2), released online last week, includes these and many more examples, common and obscure, of Canadian English. [continue]

And here it is: the Second Edition of
A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles
.

I checked to make sure that buttertart and matrimonial cake are included. They are, so it must be ok. 🙂

Clickbait

From the Wall Street Journal: You Won’t Believe What Word This Column Is About!

“Clickbait” came together as a compound as early as 1999. That year, Network Magazine reported on a “‘clickbait’ Web page” that exhorted, “Click here to become a millionaire in five minutes.” Clicking on that link caused some hacker’s malicious code to be downloaded.

Nowadays, “clickbait” by and large merely induces the casual reader to click through to some inane Web feature that can never measure up to its hyperbolic headline. [continue]

Yeah, that’s a good summary. Do you read websites that feature clickbaity headlines? I try to avoid them.