Sussing out baby talk and mutant English
by
(This article is dedicated to my granddaughter Maya
Ruth Richler-Stoffman born in Bloomington, Indiana who
celebrated her first birthday on April 5, 2013)
I must confess that my Quebec English is not always
understood in the ROC (Rest of Canada), showing we Anglos must not
only be bilingual in English and French but be conversant in both
Quebec English and standard English. Here's an example: Some years
ago, in a previous millennium, I was toiling in the steel industry
and as I couldn't speak directly to a Newfoundland customer, I
left a messageasking the man to phone me back adding “my local is
222.” I found out a week later why the person never phoned me back.
My reference to “local” made him think I represented a union –
I should have used the term “extension.” Other examples of this
phenomenon are the use by Quebec Anglos of the term “stage”
for an internship and during the recent student debacle in Quebec I
even several English-speaking people refer to student
“manifestations.” Surely. it would not be apparent to most people
in the English-speaking world that manifestations are
“demonstrations.”
Given that Maya is your quintessential apolitical
one-year old not involved with unions and demonstrations, one might
ask how she fits into this article. Well, a friend of my daughter
(Maya's mom) born in Montreal but now living in South Africa had a
similar linguistic experience recently when she asked a Johannesburg
mother of a toddler whether she used a “suss.” Thos term was met
with total non-comprehension by the mother who surmised that “suss”
was a Bantu term she wasn't familiar with. So what's going on here?
In reality, English
is available in a plethora of flavours. The
Oxford Companion to the English Language
(OCEL) lists over 400 varieties. Some of them are rather obscure
such as Pitcairnese defined as “the
creole spoken by the descendants of the mutineers from HMS Bounty,
who settled on uninhabited Pitcairn Island in 1790.”
Quebec English is actually one of the mutations listed
in the OCEL. In my
dealings with the outside world, I'm constantly being reminded, if
not chided, about the distinctiveness of my English. Just like my
daughter's friend residing in South Africa, many a mother born in
Quebec, but bringing up her children eleswhere, is likely to have
her mongrel English roots sussed out were she to use the word
“suss” as a noun in a baby care context. You see, for many
Quebec anglophones a “suss” is their word of choice for a
pacifier but this term is not to be found among other
English-speaking peoples. That is because it comes from the
French-Canadian term for a pacifier sucon
or suce and derives
from the French word sucer “to
suck.” Even in France this Quebecois term would be largely
unknown as the definitive word there would be une
tetine.
However, this mongrelization is not unusual as the term
pacifier varies quite a lot in the English-speaking world. In the
United Kingdom the term pacifier is largely unknown and the
definitive term for such is a “dummy” because the device is an
artificial teat. But even in North America and the UK today many
people will use other terms than pacifier and dummy; these include
binky or nuk (or nuk-nuk.) Binky was actually a brand name for a
pacifier introduced by Playtex in 1948 and produced until 1977. Nuk
derives from the Nuk baby product company which was established in
Germany in 1964. Interestingly, the term binky grew beyond the sense
of pacifier and is often used to refer to a young child's blanket,
stuffed animal or other prized possession.
In fact, terms for many products we associate with
babies vary considerably in the English-speaking world. To paraphrase
George Bernard Shaw, British English and North American English are
two languages separated by an ocean, and we see this chasm in many
terms associated with “baby talk.” After all, “popping” a
baby in a “cot” in Britain just means placing it there, whereas
stating that you “popped” a baby in a North American “crib”
might get you arrested for harming an infant.
Also, in England, a nanny changes a baby's nappy and not
its diaper. The word “nappy” was first used in English in the
14th century when
it referred to a textile fabric and by the next century it referred
more specificaaly to a linen fabric. It is in the 17th
century that the word is first used to refer to a baby's napkin or
cloth. The word nappy is a version of napkin and its first citation
in the OED is in 1927.
Another transatlantic difference. the “pram” to refer to a baby
carriage goes back to 1884 and I was actually that it is actually a
shortening of the word perambulator. Nowadays this term has succumbed
on both sides of the pond to the more generic descriptive “push
chair” or “stroller.”
Happy first birthday, Maya. May you grow to embrace all
the forms of English you encounter in the coming year of starting to
learn to speak oue ever-changing language.
Howard Richler'st book How Happy
Became Homosexual and other mysterious semantic shifts will
be published by Ronsdale Press in May 2013.
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