09:42 – Barbara and her family finally got on the road late yesterday afternoon. They broke their trip in Roanoke, and will finish the drive this morning. Her dad is still on IV vancomycin, which she has to administer at 9:00 p.m. daily. Colin and I are missing her, but we’re surviving so far.
Last night, we watched several more episodes of Heartland. Well, I watched, while Colin mostly pestered me to throw his toys down the hall. I wouldn’t mind if he’d just bring them to me and drop them so that I could pick them up and throw them. But that’s not enough participation to satisfy him. He brings them, drops them, and as soon as I reach for them, he grabs them away from me and then stands there whining at me. Very annoying.
Despite our mutual kidding, there aren’t really any speech characteristics that allow one to discriminate reliably between Canadians and Americans. Yes, there’s the “ou” diphthong, which most (not all) Americans pronounce to rhyme with “cow” and most (not all) Canadians pronounce to kind of rhyme with “loose”. But there are many Americans who use the “Canadian” pronunciation, and vice versa.
So, on my first pass through the five seasons of Heartland, I thought I’d discovered a speech difference. On three or four occasions, one of the characters was referring to his or her school days and used a construct that strikes American ears as strange. Where an American would say, “my third-grade teacher”, Canadians apparently instead say, “my grade-three teacher”. I thought I’d discovered something.
Then, last night as I re-watched episode six of series three, Lou was telling Amy, Ty, and Scott in detail how much work was involved in caring for an orphaned foal. Scott (the vet) asked her how she knew so much about it, and she replied that she’d done a “sixth-grade” project on the subject. Oh, well.
We ended up shipping six kits yesterday, four chemistry and two biology. So far today, we have only one order. That’s actually a bit of a relief, considering that our finished-goods inventory is now down to only four biology kits and five chemistry kits. So yesterday afternoon I brought 30 almost-complete biology kits up from the basement. They’re now sitting in the kitchen, where I’ll complete final assembly today and stack them in the finished-goods inventory area. Once I finish that, I’ll start assembling another 30 chemistry kits, followed by yet another 30 chemistry kits. Then it’s 30 forensic science kits. Lather, rinse, repeat.
12:18 – When I shipped our first science kit to Canada a month or so ago, I had to drive to the post office to have the box weighed. Even though I was shipping the box International Priority Mail flat-rate, the customs documents required an actual weight for the box. So, the other day I finally got around to ordering a shipping scale from Amazon.com, which arrived yesterday and which I used for the first time today.
The main reason I put off ordering a shipping scale so long was that I figured it’d be expensive and I didn’t really have time to do any comparisons before ordering. So I was shocked when I found a perfectly suitable scale from a good manufacturer on Amazon for $35. It’s the American Weigh Ship-Elite. It has a capacity of 50 kilos/110 pounds and resolution of 0.1 ounce across that range. The metric resolution is 1 gram up to 20 kilos and 2 grams from 20 to 50 kilos. It runs on two AA cells or the included AC adaptor, and has a remote read-out on a coiled cord.
I may actually use it in the lab as well. For example, one of the solutions included in the biology kit requires dissolving 1.5 kilos of dipotassium hydrogen phosphate in 15 liters of water. Weighing out 1,500 grams of something on a lab scale with a capacity of 200 grams is a pain in the butt. With this scale, I can weigh it in one pass, and know that I have between 1499 and 1501 grams, which at ± 0.07% is certainly close enough.
13:24 – Geez, I’d forgotten what a pain in the ass it is to pack biology kits. I was wondering the other day why we’d made a second set of goggles an option with the chemistry kits, but not the biology kits. Now I remember. When all of the components of a biology kit are in the box, there’s no room for anything more. Nothing. Not even a packing peanut. I’m even opening the ziplock bags to squeeze excess air out. These biology kits are, in the words of Veronica Mars (referring to game hens), “dense little turkeys“.
I’ve been Canadian for almost 53 yrs, and thought I spoke it fluently? I only know three people who say “hoose” and two of them are Americans. I, and probably 90% of the population say “howse”. I do, however, pronounce route to rhyme with root, whereas many Americans rhyme it with the “how” sound. I used to think that was a Mississippi break, the West says “root” and the East say “rowt”, but I’m no longer sure about that. I don’t think there is only one way to pronounce “ou”. I do know that the vast majority of the “oo” speakers are from Ontario.
I’ve noticed that most Americans pronounce decal as “dEE-cal”, where most Canadians say “deck-el”. My pet theory is Americans tend to over-pronounce their vowels, and tend to let those sounds carry longer, giving them their particular drawl. The farther South you go, the longer they hold the vowel, or so it seems.
I use grade-three or third-grade interchangeably, and without thought as to why. Perhaps we tend to associate events with “sixth-grade” and people with “grade-three”?
I also call carbonated sugar drinks by various names: Pop, Soda, Soda-Pop, but mostly we just say “I’ll have a *insert brand name here*, please!” without referring to the kind of drink, at all.
Robert,
Life-long Canuck here with roots down East, but have lived all my North American life in Ontario (Am an Air Force brat and spent my first five years living in Baden-Baden in Germany). Like America, Canadians do have a regional accent or two to deal with. And I’m pretty sure most of the oo speakers are from Maritimes or have ancestors who originated in Canada’s four most eastern provinces. The accent in Newfoundland is a LOT closer to Bostonion than the rest of western Canada, for example. It’s a bit broader. I was visiting my grandmother in Kelligrews (just outside St. John’s, NF) once and asked where my dad was. She told me, “By the bay, boy’ but to my then untuned ears, it sounded like “By the by, by.” Newfoundland might be God’s Little Green Acre on Earth, but boy do they talk funny down there [G].
When I went down to Memphis for a job interview once, the various folk at the American Contract Bridge League looked at me funnily for three days until I finally matched their misconception on Canadian speech and used an unexpected o0, I think it was route, but I can’t remember. Truly, it is NOT a Canadianism, as much as an Eastern Canadianism, and far east at that.
Now, ‘Eh!” Well, that’s as Canadian as maple syrup, Mounties, beavers and hockey on ice. It’s OUR umm. And we’re damn proud of it.
But, really, most of Canada talks like they’re from California … thanks to TV and Hollywood’s insidious ability to get the young’uns to mimic what they see and hear.
Hope all continues to get better in the Clan Thompson. Thanks for your daily posts. GM
What’s wrong with talkin’ Californian. Of course in this part of Californian it often sounds a lot like Texas but less so as the Dust Bowl immigrants die off. One of my friends from Texas used to point out to us that we said “You guys” as much as she said “Y’all”.
Actually, all of the actors on Heartland pronounce “ou” closer to “oo” than “ow”, and, with the exception of Amber Marshall, who’s from Ontario, they’re from Alberta or British Columbia.
I’ll concede that eastern Canadians use a more extreme “oo” sound than others from farther west, but the shift toward “oo” is detectable in almost any Canadian’s speech. Granted, it’s sometimes difficult to discriminate between a Canadian and, say, a North Dakotan or Montanan.
But then I’ve always had a very sensitive ear for speech patterns. I posted this on my journal back in 1999 in response to an email.
Do your really need to make 15 liters of that solution at a time? Are you including 500ml of it in each kit?
No, just 125 mL. That’s 8 kits per liter or 120 kits per 15 liters. I suppose I could make up just eight liters at a time, which’d be 60 kits worth with some spare. That’d be four 2-liter bottles at 200 g each. Actually, I may do it that way. Plus or minus a gram in 200 g is only 0.5% error, and the solution in question is a fertilizer concentrate, so it wouldn’t make much difference even if I were ± 5% or even 10%.
Impressive. I must confess, I have no idea what someone from Newcastle sounds like.
Sounds are difficult things…
It doesn’t hurt that we have a good friend who’s from Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Although she moved to Mississippi years ago, her extended family often came to visit her back when she lived in Winston-Salem, and I’d spend hours talking to them. In addition to Newcastle, Carlisle and several other places from Northern England were represented. Before long, I started picking up subtle differences in their vowels.
A soder, or soder-pop or pop in eastern MA is a tonic. A sub sandwich or hoagie or hero is a grinduh. And a mostly frozen milkshake-type drink is a frappe. I spent my early childhood learning English along the southeastern MA/Rhode Island border and then from age 8 on, the various small towns and ‘burbs just outside Boston. By the way, Rhode Island is pronounced as all one word: Road-Eye-Lun. Where the chowder is sorta halfway between Maine’s heavy-on-the-cream and Connecticut’s almost clear to Manhattan’s tomato base.
The key in eastern MA lingo or, in fact, most New England speech is to remove the letter “r” from words where you see it on the printed page normally, and then insert it in other words. Thus, of course, barn is bahn, car is cah, etc. Then we have ideer. If see a bear we call it a bayah. Rural Vermont and Maine are significantly more bizarre at times. A cow here is a cayow. The town of Calais is pronounced Kallas. Towns like Milton and Bolton have their second vowel dropped.
Diversity, baby; learn it, love it, live it. Yeah, right.
I’ve never been good at separating North American accents, perhaps because I don’t live there. To me there are two accents north of the Rio Grande: “North American (excluding the southern US)” and “Southern US.” I know which I prefer…
When I was in DC for a few weeks the people spoke “normal” English, a friend from Ohio spoke “horrible” English – it really grated on me. An instructor from SAS Institute spoke “wonderful” English – on a par with Scottish, Welsh and southern English English. A Californian woman I heard on Skype just spoke normal US English. She could have been from anywhere in North America outside the southern US for all I knew.
I’m told that most Cannuks hate been mistaken for their southern neighbors, but I wouldn’t usually be able to distinguish. I’m told Bostonian English is in a league of its own.
People from Adelaide can be distinguished by the way we say “school”. We say “skool”, New South Welshpersons say “sco-oo-oo-l”. Sounds very posh in comparison. Even an Adelaide raised newsreader who read the news for the ABC in Sydney adopted the posh pronunciation. I considered him a betrayer.
*The instructor from the SAS Institute was from Alabama. She tought me some SAS for three days. I listened intently every second. Except when I wasn’t perving… 🙂
Bostonian English is, indeed, in a class by itself. Although there are even variants there; between Southie, mostly Irish; East and North Boston, mostly Italian; and Charlestown, again, mostly Irish. Then there is the pseudo-posh of Beacon Hill and the remaining bluestocking Puritans.
There are also islands off the coast of Maine that are pretty remote and isolated and the year-rounders, mostly fishermen and their families, have some vestiges of early 17th-C Elizabethan/Jacobean English.
My initiation to Boston was way back when you first had pump your own gas, and then go inside the Shell station (back when they were not the most expensive brand in town) and use your Shell card and get back a little 3×5 receipt, which sometimes the local dealer would forget to send in. After paying, I pulled my keys out of my pocket, but the guy coming in the door as I was going out, said: “Ya drappt ya quahtuh.” If he had not pointed to the ground, as a Natick newbie, I would have had no idea what he said.
Got used to the accent very quickly. Still miss raspberry rickeys. You can get those at the DQ’s in Boston, but not out here in Tiny Town.
Raspberry rickeys with a splash of lime and a lime slice on it. And the DQs used to have pretty good broiled and grilled burgers back in the day; there was even one way the hell out on Route 9 in Spensuh. Halfway between Woostuh and Ammerst.
Not too long ago Mrs. OFD and I made a trip down to MA for some reason or other, it doesn’t happen very often anymore, and apparently my old MA accent got thicker and thicker the closer we got to the state line. She was in hysterics in the cah.
Luckily my immediate boss at work is from the Lawrence-Lowell air-ree-er and we can understand each other when talk about a bad hahd drive or system bohd.
when WE talk…sheeeesh. Fat finguhs typin too fast.
I’ve heard Boston milkshakes are different from elsewhere in the US and that shopping trolleys have a strange name there.
I worked with a software company in Middleboro, and my contact had the broadest Bostonian accent I’ve ever heard, other than comedians putting on the accent. It took me a while to puzzle out some of his pronounciations, and my favorite was “acownin” meaning “accounting”. He also pronounced Middleboro as if it was one syllable. I can’t duplicate it.
Loved Boston when I visited. Mind you, I wasn’t driving and only stayed downtown, but what history!
Middle Borough is adjacent to Plymouth, of course, and there is a lot of colonial history around the area if one knows where to look for it and gets away from the usual tourista haunts. Also, if one is down there in the fall, there is no more gorgeous sight on this planet than the cranberry bogs on a bright crisp October morning. It is stunning.
If you go to Boston, do not, I repeat, do not, attempt to drive in downtown, unless you are an old salty bugger like OFD, who learned to drive as a teenager in the Greater Boston area, including downtown. Use the pretty good public trans infrastructure and WALK. Avoid tourista areas. Avoid Newberry Street. Do not go stumbling into Charlestown or Southie. Or Roxbury; avoid Blue Hill Avenue.
DO visit the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. And the Church of the Advent, where Mrs. Gardner scrubbed the steps with a brush every Lent on her hands and knees.
http://www.gardnermuseum.org/
Check out the cemeteries. Visit the North End and eat great Eye-talian food. See if you can get out to the Hahbuh islands.
Bring a phrasebook of Boston English. I had two of them here at one time, but sorta like bringing coals to Newcastle.
And remember that although it is cool to see the vestiges of early 17th-C colonial history there, it is like unto yesterday when compared to the history you can see in the British Isles and Europe, of course. We just got here.
Of all the places I lived in the US, Boston was by far my favorite. Everything very accessible, more trees than I have ever seen in my life, parks and open spaces everywhere, idyllic countryside especially in the fall, the education capital of the US no matter what your niche, and at least some hint of public transit. Best acoustic symphony hall in the world, since the model it was based on, in Leipzig, was taken out during the war.
A milkshake in Boston, is of course, milk shaken. Frappe is what the rest of the country calls a milkshake—with ice cream in it—and technically, Boston has it correct. Shopping trolleys, which are “shopping carts” in the rest of the US, are “carriages” in Boston. Car turn signals are “directionals” in Boston, as in “We don’t need no damn directionals,” and they mean it.
My kids learned to drive in Boston, so I never worry about their skills anywhere else. I love driving in Boston, because everybody keeps moving. One of the hardest things to cope with in Indianapolis, is when a left-turn traffic signal comes on, the first car finally wakes up and goes, then the second car pauses until the first is in the intersection and he starts going, and like an accordion slowly being pulled out, about 3 or 4 cars out of 7 or 8 get through the intersection before the green arrow turns to red, and only half the load gets to go. When I moved to Chicago, the first thing you learn is that when the green arrow comes on, EVERYBODY starts moving at once. In Boston, it is similar, but if everyone does not get through, the opposing traffic will not go until everyone has turned left in front of them—even if their light is green. What blueblood courtesy!
Actually, there’s some skeletal evidence that North America was originally settled by Caucasians from Europe long before the migration of peoples from Asia, whose descendants became the American Indians. The recent unpleasantness between whites and Indians may in fact have been a reprise of an earlier war to extinction that the whites lost.
Here’s a more or less standard explication of Boston English:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_accent
And here is jumped-up Boston English, now disappearing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfR4DLXYpCw
No, no, no, RBT. The white man (emphasis on “man” as contrasted with “persyn of womynhood”) is always in the wrong. And noble savages never exterminate other races or cultures or species. The notion that whites lost a war-to-extermination with the Noble Red Man is ludicrous. It’s much more likely that whites came in, caused global warming, died, and were replaced by Noble Red Men, er, Persyns.
“…North America was originally settled by Caucasians from Europe…”
I’ve seen bits and pieces of this information recently; it is a very tough sell in academia for obvious reasons and certain documentaries and videos have become almost impossible to find lately. Unfortunately, some of this info has been and is being used by the usual supremacist-type suspects and thus gets immediately dismissed by the university and media gate-keepers.
From what I have seen, the academic types have some explaining and backtracking to do, in light of archaeological finds here in North America and also in the western Chinese deserts.
Yes, it’s unfortunate, but racists and other slime will jump on anything they believe will promote their agendum.
There are now at least half a dozen skeletal remains that are clearly Caucasoid and clearly pre-date the earliest possible influx of Asians to North America. All else is speculation. We don’t know how many of each there were, and whether or not they ever even encountered the other group. It’s possible that these earliest European settlers were present in relatively small numbers and concentrated in only a few areas. They may have all died in a plague or starved. Or they may have warred and been eradicated.
Then there are the men and women who look a lot like us and around the same size, too, found in the western deserts of China, with long red hair. The Chinese authorities don’t like this at all, at all.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/a-meeting-of-civilisations-the-mystery-of-chinas-celtic-mummies-413638.html