scad

Posted on July 9, 2013 | Leave a comment

I’m sure you know this word in the plural: scads, as in scads of money or scads of any of various other things. Meaning ‘lots, plenty’ – but with that /æ/ vowel that can allow the same broad long sound as in “faaabulous” or just tap into the louche quality of skag and stab and scab and similar words, like a flat skid.

But when we say tons of money or loads of money or lots of money or gobs of money or or or, we know what tons, loads, lots, gobs, et cetera are when they’re at home. Any idea what a scad is when it’s not a whole bunch?

For me, as long as I’ve known any sense other than the ‘plenty’ one, it’s been ‘a sudden, brief rain shower’. Now, that makes decent sense. It even sort of sounds right for that meaning. But there’s just one problem: you’re not going to find that sense in your dictionary. Not Merriam-Webster, not American Heritage, not even Oxford. You will find it betokening a kind of wild black plum, a kind of fish of the Caranx genus, salmon fry, a slab of peat or tuft of grass, or – in Scotland – a word for a faint appearance of colour or light. And pretty much all these scads are of obscure or unknown origin. But a rain shower? No.

Egad. Did I make it up? No, I know where I learned that sense. I learned it from a play by Newfoundland playwright Michael Cook. That’s a sense of the word that is, or at least used to be, current in Newfoundland. You can check the Dictionary of Newfoundland English. So if you’re a Newfoundlander out fishing for cod or shad, a scad can make you skid on the deck as your boat scuds on the ocean. I don’t know if there’s any link between this scad and the ‘plenty’ one; the shower scad appears to be related to a noun scud. Perhaps they came from the same place.

But we don’t know for sure. Like a good scad, the word just shows up from who-knows-where and does its stuff. Lots of stuff. Scads.

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freshet

Posted on July 8, 2013 | 1 comment

This word has a splash of refreshment in its sound, like Suzanne Pleshette with a bottle of Freixenet. In fact, it almost sounds like a brand name for plug-in air fresheners or mouthwash strips. Or it could be some little thing you catch in a fish net, or a female freshman, or a refreshed fourchette (French fork), or some hip-hop artist, or…

Just listen to how it splashes, like a Ferrari into a flooded underpass! First with the [f], then the swelling up of the liquid [r], then opening to the mid-front [ɛ] before the big splash of [ʃ] and the quick deceleration and downsplash of [ɪt]. Is it perhaps a quick rainstorm?

Close! It’s a sudden flood of a stream or river due to rain, melting snow, both, or something else. This word looks like it comes from fresh, and in fact it does. Originally it was just a name for a freshwater stream that flows into the sea, but by the mid-1600s it had gained the additional specific meaning of a quick flood of a fresh stream.

In short, it’s what Cougar Creek in Canmore and Exshaw Creek in Exshaw and the Elbow River in Calgary became a couple of weeks ago, and what the Don River and a few other streams became this afternoon in Toronto. Quick as a whisternefet (a sharp slap), a simple flow of fresh water flashed into flood form. Just because before the stream could empty, more and more water came to refreshet. Freshet’s sake…

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tardigrade

Posted on July 8, 2013 | 1 comment

Don’t know what a tardigrade is? Well, going by the word, what would you expect? Something scholastic, perhaps? After all, tardy is a word for ‘late’ used only by teachers, and usually just the ones you don’t like much, and grade is a school word par excellence. Or maybe it’s an Eastern Europe city, like Belgrade? Or perhaps it’s something science-fictiony… there is that echo of TARDIS, after all.

Well, imagine a creature that can survive in outer space. Imagine one that already has. On a space shuttle. Outside a space shuttle. This is a beastie that can withstand pressures several times as strong as those at the bottom of the ocean. It can withstand temperatures well above boiling, and close to absolute zero. It can withstand radiation in doses hundreds of times what would kill you or me. It can go without food and water for years. It can survive indefinite dehydration to 3% of its usual body water or less and then, when rehydrated, go on as if nothing had happened.

I mean, holy cow. And it’s got claws like bears. Eight of them: four pairs of legs. And it has a hard shell, and lays eggs. And it looks like a bear with no eyes and a mouth like an auger or something: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130306.html. And it’s everywhere. Go for a stroll in a forest and they’re probably all around you. Dude, I’m not making this up.

Naturally, the only sort of critter that could possibly do and be all this is a very small one. And thank your lucky stars for this. (Some people think tardigrades actually came from nearby stars. It’s not entirely implausible.) Tardigrades are generally less than a millimetre long. (For my American readers, a millimetre is about 1/24 of an inch. Oh, and by the way, only three countries in the world don’t use metric: the US, Liberia, and Myanmar. Just going to leave that with you.)

A couple more things: it’s also called a water bear, and it lumbers kind of like a bear too. It’s not an especially fast-moving thing. In fact, that’s where its name comes from: Latin tardus ‘slow’ and gradus ‘walking’, by way of French. This indestructible intergalactic juggernaut is at least not a fast-moving one.

And, just to complete the picture, I must tell you it’s a stripper too. You may know that the fancy term for a stripper (peeler, exotic dancer) is ecdysiast. Well, tardigrades belong to the superphylum ecdysozoa – stripper life-forms. They shed their outer layers every so often – moulting, or, as biologists call it, ecdysis.

Isn’t that just incredibly charming and pleasant? Click-drag this beastie to about ten thousand times its current dimensions and you have something pretty near perfect for a sci-fi horror flick. But maybe give it a different name, something with a little less tard and grade.

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Morley

Posted on July 4, 2013 | 10 comments

There is one last Bow Valley place name that I find I can’t avoid treating on. It’s the place I actually lived for much of my childhood, the community that my parents were connected with. For me, in a strange way, it both was and was not my home.

Morley.

This name may have an easy familiarity for you from many places. There are many people with that name, first and last: Morley Safer the journalist, Morley Callaghan the author, the female protagonist of Stuart Maclean’s weekly narratives on CBC, Thomas Morley the composer, Robert Morley the actor, Edward Morley the scientist – famous for the Michaelson-Morley experiment, which was a seminal step in the proof that the speed of light is invariant in a vacuum and thus an early harbinger of Einstein’s relativity…

All of these, and more, make me think of Morley, Alberta. So, to some extent, does the name Marley; so too, Mexican mole sauce; a taste of it in Westmoreland; perhaps in murmur; some in mouldy; even in more and nevermore. An antonym in Lesley or Leslie. You see, Morley was one of the earliest names I ever knew. I think I knew Morley was home around the same time I knew Harbeck was my family name.

And yet.

When I was a little kid, it was all I knew. I joined my parents everywhere. I trailed them around as my father greeted, one by one, ever single person at the banquet, or the tent meeting, or the house meeting, or the pow-wow, over and over, “Âba wathtech,” shake hands. Long chats in a language I didn’t know. At pow-wows, the sounds of drumming and singing. At house meetings in one house or another on the reserve, song after song after song – “What a Friend We Have In Jesus,” “Amazing Grace,” all the classics, and long testimonies and long prayers, some in English, some in Stoney, many switching back and forth. The older people making cooing noises over little me, calling me by my Stoney name, “Îpabi Daguskan!” Son of Rock, or Stone Child. One piece of Morley given at birth that I get to keep as long as I live. Given to me, in fact, by a man named Morley Twoyoungmen.

But I didn’t go to the school on the reserve. With many of the Stoney kids, my brother and I took the bus to Exshaw for school. And that was when I began to feel separate from the reserve. Not because I was away from the Stoney kids – I rode the bus with them every day, and half the kids in my class were Stoney. Just because I obviously wasn’t one of them, even if their parents were my parents’ friends. I didn’t speak their language, and I somehow never learned it – I somehow didn’t try, even though my Dad was and still is fluent in it. Every kid gets picked on on the school bus unless he’s the one doing the picking on, and dorky kids who stick out have it worse. It just happens that the kids picking on me were Stoney. I felt less and less like them, less and less part of the place.

And Morley – the usual name for the reserve, after the village at the heart of it with the administration building and the community hall and the health centre and the school and the fitness centre and the church – was where I lived with my family, much of the time out in the country, no other houses in walking distance, the wind whistling outside the window, just me and my brother and my parents and one channel of TV and some records and books, especially a set of encyclopedias. It’s where I was lonely, lonelier than I even knew.

My childhood was peripatetic, yes, in a way. You may remember from my note on Exshaw that we lived in Exshaw when I was little. Let me flesh this out a bit more. Before I went to school, we had lived in or near Rocky Mountain House, briefly in California and Mexico, in Calgary, in Seebe (near Exshaw, named after Charles Brewster), and in the town of Morley; when I was in grade 1 we lived in a small house in Exshaw; the next year, when I was in grade 3 (I accelerated), we lived in a larger house in Exshaw that we had had built; the following year we moved back to the reserve, to a house on the north side of it that at first didn’t even have indoor plumbing (yes, I had to use an outhouse, even in winter); the year after that, my brother and I went to a private school south of Calgary because the Exshaw school psychologist said it was a better place for gifted children, which we had turned out to be, and so we lived in Calgary; the year after that, we went to Springbank School west of Calgary and lived in the centre of Morley (i.e., the actual village); then we went back to Exshaw when I was in grade 7, and when I was in grade 8 we moved from the centre of Morley to what we called the game farm house: a large house formerly owned by Mickey Bailey, a TV wildlife guy who had owned a game farm just at the edge of the reserve. The game farm went bust, Bailey left, the Stoneys got the house, we were allowed to live in it because my dad was doing audiovisual productions for the Stoneys and the house was well set up for it. My mom taught school on the reserve. We continued to live there until I was in university in Calgary, although I actually lived with friends in Banff during the week for grades 11 and 12. The house isn’t there now. Last time I saw it it was unoccupied, vandalized, windows and walls smashed, and I could walk through the picture window and through the empty living room that had held my dad’s two thousand books and my adolescent lonely dreams; the time after that, it was a flat gravel patch – the house had been burnt down.

So, uh, there it is. And woven in that is a life spent more in the country than in the city, a life spent more away from other kids than with them. Out in the country for much of it, with wind howling through the trees outside my window. In a house late at night with blackness outside and no people and a basement that is just a place children put their terrors for keeping. And in all that, the young years when the Stoney kids had been my playmates fell away fast. Play? No. Not by junior high school.

I can’t hold a grudge against the Stoney kids who picked on me. They were just kids too. And I had quite a mouth on me, believe me. I created a fair amount of my own trouble. And many of them didn’t have really good lives. The reserve had its social problems then, and it still has many of them. And some of the kids who picked on me in grades 8 and 9 were dead before I finished my bachelor’s degree. Drunk driving. Suicide. The kid who was my greatest nemesis, the son of some of my parents’ best friends, has now been dead almost twice as long as he ever lived.

So I don’t go there a lot. Not to visit, not to remember. My life is much better now. It wasn’t a horrible life for me, don’t get me wrong. But I just don’t have a lot of desire to return to it. There are still many wonderful people there, a whole community, some of my parents’ best friends. I just don’t much feel part of it. I left it, and lived in another direction. I moved away, or it faded away, or both: all motions and emotions are relative.

But it’s still there.

Morley has, in fact, been there for a long time. The Stoneys, the Nakoda people, have of course been in and around what’s now Alberta for a very, very long time. Morley is a place that came to being with European arrivals, but it has been there as such since 1873. The McDougall family, Methodist missionaries, set up there; read in detail about them at mcdougallstoneymission.com (the link is to a PDF). They arrived not to convert the Stoneys; the Stoneys were already Christians when the McDougalls arrived, worshipping in much the same avid, revivalist way that I experienced growing up (but they also had not altogether lost their pre-Christian religious culture). The McDougalls were not the sterotype of condescending and brutal missionaries; they were avid advocates for the Indians, even if they did have some white blind spots, such as naming things in European fashion. They were liked and respected by the Stoneys.

The McDougalls built a church, which is still there, now the oldest surviving protestant church in southern Alberta and the oldest surviving building in the Bow Valley (which includes Banff and Calgary), though it’s not normally used anymore. And they built up a trading post near the church. The whole settlement was in a classic Alberta location, on the benchland well above the Bow River, with hills around unto which to lift up your eyes, and the mountains to the west. Nearly always grey and brown as far as the eye can see. And the settlement, first called Ghost River after a nearby river that joins the Bow, was renamed Morleyville after Morley Punshon, a friend of John McDougall. I believe this would have been the same William Morley Punshon who was a noted Noncomformist Methodist preacher, born in Doncaster, Yorkshire, and moved to Canada, where he did much to advance the Methodist denomination before returning to England. When the settlement and trading post relocated down into the valley, it retained the Morley part of the name that they had given it.

So Morley was, as a place and a name, brought from England as surely as about half of my genes were (well back in the past). Morley Punshon would likely have been named after Morley, West Yorkshire, near Leeds. That town is an old one; its name is a composite of the words that independently came to be Modern English moor and lea. That’s apposite: the wide open hills of southwestern Alberta are rather like the moors of Yorkshire (open grassy windswept empty spaces), and the more verdant dells near the river are readily enough called leas.

And yet somehow Morley never really noticeably affected the taste of the words moor and lea for me, not that I was aware. But it has come to flavour so strongly one more word: memory.

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Banff

Posted on July 3, 2013 | 8 comments

There are two more place names that were central to my formative years. One of them is Banff. Banff is the town that for years we would go to for church on Sunday, with lunch and library after, and sometimes for movies on other nights, and for the hot springs, and for hikes in the surrounding park, especially over Lake Louise. Banff Avenue was a familiar mall of delights; the Banff Springs Hotel was our local castle where we sometimes went for brunch buffets. And when I learned to ski, Banff’s ski areas became as famous a topography in my mind as Manhattan is for movies.

Banff formed a geography of my imagination, it and its mountains and glaciers and history; it was and still is my Eden. And then, after finishing junior high in Exshaw, I went to high school in Banff, riding in with my brother for the first year and staying with friends in town for the other two. I spent the heart of my adolescence in this town in the heart of the mountains. Think of all the meaningful moments of your mid-teens. Transpose them to a mountain resort town, one of the most famous mountain resort towns on the planet, and a high school class of just a couple dozen students. The movies you saw, the parties you misbehaved at, the teenage crushes, the friends you cruised around with, all in a town in a crotch of the mountains, every place you go a corner of a postcard. Imagine your graduating class having a weekend hike to a cabin in the mountains (no, not nearly as wholesome an activity as you may imagine). Imagine the morning of your graduation having a champagne breakfast at the top of the Sulphur Mountain Gondola. Imagine your graduation in the ballroom of the Banff Springs Hotel.

Even if Banff has no such associations for you, if you have ever been there it may very well have the same first impression in your mind: the smell of crisp evergreen-fresh mountain air, the sight of stones and logs in the local public architecture.

Or Banff may bring to mind sea air and ruins of a castle and many old Scottish buildings… if you’ve been to the one in Scotland. Of course the Banff in Alberta is named after another Banff, which is formerly the county town of Banffshire (now assimilated into Aberdeenshire), birthplace of at least three men who had some connection to the town’s founding (the two co-founders of the Canadian Pacific Railway and a member of the National Parks Board), although there’s precious little resemblance between the two places – no more than between Calgary, Alberta, and Calgary, Scotland, or between Milford Sound, New Zealand, and Milford Haven, Wales.

Names can reflect errors and false hopes; Tunnel Mountain, the little tremont on the side of which much of Banff townsite is draped, is so named for a railroad tunnel that was originally proposed to go through it – although a look at the valley very quickly reveals that it makes much more sense simply to go around it, which is what the tracks ultimately did. So Tunnel Mountain is named for a feature that it does not have, and Banff is named for a place that it resembles very, very little. But words assimilate effects of their objects. There is nothing intrinsically montane about the word Banff, but it shines to my eyes like the snow and icefalls on Cascade Mountain; its ff are the tall conifers that line its streets and paths and form its buildings’ timbers.

We might also say that sounds assimilate like meanings, suiting themselves to the place of their environs. After all, it is generally accepted as a truism that Banff is pronounced “bamf” (which is also how you would pronounce Bamff, the name of a different place in Scotland). But in fact, it’s not even that; there are only three phones in the standard pronunciation: [bæ̃f] – the vowel is nasalized; the nasalization and voicing may sometimes spread rightward onto the start of the [f], making it a voiced labiodental nasal, [ɱ] (giving four phones: [bæ̃ɱf]), but that’s really just a variable epiphenomenon.

And what does Banff mean? It’s not entirely agreed on. The modern Gaelic for the Scottish town’s name is Banbh (in Gaelic bh is generally pronounced [v]). That’s also the Gaelic word for ‘suckling piglet’, but that’s unlikely to be the source of the town’s name. Perhaps more likely is that it’s a contraction of bean-naobh, ‘holy woman’. (Across the estuary of the river Deveron is the town of Macduff, a name familiar to readers of Shakespeare’s Scottish play.)

The name also has echoes of bumf, as in the acres of bumf about the town to be found in tourist brochures, and bath, which makes me think of the warm waters of the Banff Hot Springs. I also think of Braniff, at one time the name of an airline noted for its design sensibility. Take out the indefinite an from Banff and you get Bff, a best friend forever. Well, friends are not always forever (though I have reconnected with several of my classmates in recent years), but the mountain majesty and mythos of Banff are certainly lasting.

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Exotic city names that are actually pretty dull

Posted on July 1, 2013 | Leave a comment

TheWeek.com has posted another article by me, this one on city names that may sound exotic but actually mean something rather plain in the language their residents speak:

14 exotic city names that sound boring when translated

Kuala Lumpur just doesn’t sound as magical when you translate it to Muddy Confluence

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Phonological analysis of beatbox sounds

Posted on June 29, 2013 | Leave a comment

My latest article for TheWeek.com is in response to a suggestion made in a comment on my article on noises teenagers make. Someone asked for an analysis of the sounds beatboxers make. That’s a pretty tall order, but there are few little things that stand out, and I cover them:

A phonological description of beatbox noises

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Kananaskis

Posted on June 27, 2013 | 2 comments

A short distance east of Exshaw on the Highway 1A is a little hamlet called Kananaskis. In my junior high days I came up with a little joke on it: I asked someone, “Hey, that little place just east of here, I forgot its name. What is it?” “Kananaskis,” the person said. “What was that again?” “Kananaskis!” “I don’t know. Kiss my ass and find out!”

Yes, yes, puerile. But if you were in any doubt as to how this name is pronounced, you aren’t now.

If you’re from Calgary or area, you may be thinking, “Little village? It’s a big area south of the Trans-Canada Highway! The alpine events for the 1988 Winter Olympics were held at Nakiska there!” Yes, it’s that too. The village is the first place I knew the name, but I soon enough thereafter learned that it was also the name of a provincial park and of a larger recreational area, Kananaskis Country (or K-Country for short – the park is sometimes called K-Park, not to be confused with kapok). The valley that the park and country are situated in and near is the Kanaskis Valley, and the river that runs through it is the Kananaskis River. Also of the same name are a brace of lakes, a mountain range, and a summit. Oh, wait – the summit was a G20 leaders’ summit held at the resort that’s there. A lovely resort, at the foot of Mount Kidd (which rises a full mile above the valley), with 36 holes of golf.

Oh, by the way, the golf course will be closed for the rest of this year. Those floods that affected Exshaw and Calgary? Yeah, Kananaskis too. But it will recover. Just not this year. The waters met and caused a bit too much damage. But let us be grateful for all that there still is, plus all that has been and will be.

It’s a cute, crisp name, Kananaskis. Four syllables, three a’s, two n’s, two k’s, two s’s, and an i. The k’s give it a nice kick, it has a French pineapple at heart (anana), and it ends on skis, quite fittingly. So what does it mean?

You may guess that it’s a word from a local Indian (aboriginal, First Nations) language, and you would be sort of right. The First Nation that lives right around there is the Stoneys – in their own language, the Nakoda. But Kananaskis isn’t a Nakoda word. The Nakoda name for the place is ozada imne, ‘meeting of the waters’. No, Kananaskis is the name of a Cree fellow. The explorer John Palliser named the river after him – he assumed no one who might already live around there had already given it a name.

I learned, at one point, that Kananaskis meant ‘man with axe in head’. This turns out to be no more true than that Kennedy means ‘man with bullet in head’. The Cree fellow received an axe blow to the head, yes, apparently in an argument over a woman. And he recovered from it. But that’s not what his name meant. Actually, that’s not even what his name was, not quite: it was Kineahkis. Which meant (still means) ‘one who is grateful’. What was he grateful for? Being alive. Specifically, surviving the axe blow to his head – he changed his name to that after that event, I have read.

There’s another place name that merits mention: Nakiska. This is the name that was given to the ski area on Mount Allan where the 1988 downhill events were held. (This ski area is still there, and it’s a nice ski area, but it’s sad that it really ate the lunch of Fortress Mountain, the ski area I learned to ski at – a ski area without a huge vertical but with some lovely terrain, a lot of open bowl skiing, but much farther down the valley.) Nakiska means ‘meeting place’. In Nakoda? Ah, no. In Cree again. There aren’t any Cree living around Kananaskis, but I guess the marketing department thought the name sounded really good. I seem to recall that the Nakoda reaction to it at the time was more along the line of Kismyass, but…

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Exshaw

Posted on June 25, 2013 | 18 comments

I was born in Calgary but spent some of my youngest and most impressionable years in Exshaw, and went to school there until high school (excepting grades 5 and 6).

I wonder whether it had any appreciable effect on me that the first place I was aware of living in has an x in its name. And not just an x but an x followed by an s. That rather seems like a bit of excess, doesn’t it?

Where is Exshaw? On the way from Calgary to Banff – if you take the old highway, the 1A. If you take the Highway 1, the Trans-Canada, shortly after you pass the first mountains, you can see across the valley a large cement plant at the foot of a mountain subpeak that has been half blasted away. Exshaw. A dusty, windy, windy, dusty town in the mountains, mainly a working-class town, with that one big industry: cement. And that peak is a lot smaller now than it was when I was a kid. They blast more of it away every so often. You may have walked on that mountain… in some concrete made with a bit of it, perhaps in a sidewalk or a building.

Of course to small children everything seems different. Language has tricks you’re still learning. My brother said he’d give me five bucks if I sat on his back and let him throw me off five times. So I did. Having bucked me off five times, he told me I had just gotten my five bucks. Ha ha. There are train tracks leading to the cement plant, with a siding that – at least in the early 1970s – had a large dandelion plant at their abrupt end. When I asked my mother where trains come from, she said the train plant. I had the idea that that dandelion was the souce of all those freight cars. A cottage community across the valley, I was told, was Lacta’s Ark. I wondered who Lacta was (like Dracula?). Actually it’s Lac des Arcs.

And so we learned the names for places. We learned the names that you will still hear from people there. They are not in every case the official names. We would walk to a swamp east of town we called Dragonfly. I doubt it has a real name. We could go crocus picking on Cougar Mountain (not too far up – wouldn’t want to meet a cougar) – or, as the maps call it, Exshaw Mountain. We would walk up Canyon Creek – or, as maps call it, Exshaw Creek – or on the road next to it, towards a smaller set of houses called Nolerville or, as the maps call it (if they call it anything), Molnarville. We would look across the valley at a mountain that looked just like a nose – we called it Sproule’s Nose, because it looked like the nose of Mr. Sproule, one of our teachers. It’s actually Barrier Mountain, as it sports a notable rock face if you look at it from 15 mintues east. Actually, it was years before I realized they were the same mountain.

And Exshaw is dominated by Heart Mountain, a mountain the top front of which is ringed by a band of cliffs that make a heart shape. But the mountain is across the valley. You can see it, but you can’t just walk to it: you have to go ten minutes east to the Highway 1X, then several minutes south on that to the Trans-Canada, then back on the Trans-Canada to get to it – or to Lac des Arcs, at the foot of Heart Mountain and right across the river from Exshaw… but without a bridge. Just to the west is a big lake: Gap Lake. Or, in French, Lac des Arcs. I don’t recall ever seeing anyone sailing on it, though I could be wrong. It’s a very windy place, so…

The Exshaw of my youngest years is not entirely there any more, however. There was a main street with a curling rink, a grocery store, even a hotel with a bowling alley. In 1974, in order to expand the cement plant, all of that part of town was levelled. I’m still not sure why – the cement plant doesn’t occupy most of the part that was levelled. It’s just all empty ground now. Since then, there has been one store – connected to the gas station on the highway – and the only place to go for food and bev is the Legion or, as I thought of it as a kid, the Leejun: normally open only to adults, and I remember that the few times I could go in there it had a pervasive stale cigarette smoke smell. The town’s water comes down from a reservoir above the town. It’s held back by a dam and there are pipes bringing it down. They at least used to be leaky. In the winter we would hike up to look at the ice castles: remarkable structures of ice caused by the leaks spraying up from the pipe. I think they’ve fixed the pipes long since.

So Exshaw for me is quite a lot of memory. We stopped living there when I was in grade 4, though I continued to go to school there until grade 9 (except for grades 5 and 6). Now I live far, far east of there. And there are gaps and errors in my memory. Of course. But there’s no going back to 1973 to review it all and see it all again. We can drive there now, of course, and see what’s there. There’s still a lot of it there. Even the house my parents had built, and then moved out of a year later. There are new houses, too. People are moving there and enjoying it – it’s in the mountains, after all, and outside of the national park but convenient to it. But this is now and that is then. It’s a gap in time. And memory is a pipe that spings leaks from its gaps, and sometimes those leaks make ice castles.

And there are new gaps, and not just in memory. Exshaw has also suffered from the flooding that has made a mess of much of the rest of southern Alberta this past weekend. Exshaw Creek is a small creek that flows in a wide, rocky bed. Except for when it fills that whole bed. This week it washed away some of the highway, making a gap between the east and west parts of the town. It also flooded some houses and washed away at least one; at least a quarter of the houses are reported to be damaged beyond repair. The town is just now reconnecting with the rest of the world, and with itself, and it will take some time.

Why is it called Exshaw? The town was founded by Sir Sandford Fleming, a railway engineer, surveyor, explorer, et cetera – and the inventor of time zones. Fleming named the town after his son-in-law, William Exshaw, a gold medalist from the 1900 Olympics – in sailing. Fleming and Exshaw helped establish the Western Canada Cement and Coal Company. Exshaw has been a cement plant town from the beginning. (Now the plant is owned by Canada Cement Lafarge, as it has been as long as I’ve known it.)

And what do you call people from Exshaw? One of my parents once commented that it should be Exshavians, on the model that the adjectival form for Shaw is Shavian. But if I had ever used that term, my fellow students might well have held me down and shaved an X into my hair. No, there is a different model, one rather more mineral. Residents of Banff are Banffites; residents of Canmore are Canmorites. And residents of Exshaw are Exshawites. Which is said like Exshaw with ites, no pronunciation of the w. (Oh, yes, for those who don’t know, Canadian English has a low-back vowel merger: caught and cot are said the same, and the latter vowel of Exshaw is the same one as in la. It’s a four-phoneme word: /ɛkʃɑ/.)

Am I an Exshawite? Not now. Not for many years. I am an ex-Exshawite. But it is a mineral vein in my memory, one I will always strike if I mine deeply enough.

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Calgary

Posted on June 23, 2013 | 7 comments

I’m back where I’m from, for a visit with my family. Where am I from? The Bow Valley, Alberta. I was born in Calgary.

As you may have heard, the Bow River is at a hundred-year flood level, and low-lying parts of Calgary are under water. Fortunately, Calgary is a very not-flat city, and most of it is well above the damp. And Cochrane, where my parents live, has no houses close enough to river level to be flooded – the river runs through it, but down there. But let me tell you, I’ve never seen the river that high and fast.

I think it’s a good time to taste this word, Calgary. It’s a very normal, natural word for me, because I grew up with it, but I’m not oblivious to some of its salient features.

That big C figures a fair bit around town. The LRT system is called the C-Train; the brand for the Calgary Stampede is a C over a lazy S. It’s a hard [k], but it has that classy and almost delicate curve of C rather than the kicking K (imagine Kalgary. Wait, consider this: the city long known as Calcutta is now respelled Kolkata – isn’t that really, really different, in spite of the nearly identical pronunciation?).

I’m sure that as a kid I was somehow partial to Calgon as a name for dish detergent brand because of Calgary – but not so much that we didn’t use Cascade (a name anyone with a Banff connection will feel at home with). I was also reminded of Calvary (the place of the crucifixion – but not really of Golgotha, the Aramaic it translates) and, from that, of cavalry. There are also hints of garrison, ugly, gaol, Caligula, Cargill (an agricultural company), and Dr. Caligari (of the cabinet, in the movie).

One important detail is the pronunciation of this word. I remember, before the 1988 Olympics, reading a magazine’s counsel that the name of the city was pronounced like two guys’ names put together: Cal and Gary. This is so plain wrong I wrote them a letter (and they printed it). Only people not from anywhere near Calgary say it that way. The word Calgary has two and a half syllables, with the accent strongly on the first.

Two and a half? If you say it carefully, or if you sing it, it’s three, yes (the unofficial city song when I was growing up was the promo music for CFAC, channels 2 and 7 [you must watch it on YouTube to know the place I grew up]: “Makes no difference where I go, you’re the best hometown I know. Hello Calgary, hello Calgary-y-y… channels two and seven love you”). But really, the second syllable is normally just a long /r/, just a little longer than if you said “calgry.” The “grry” is more than a syllable but not really as much as two normal ones. Oh, and the /l/ is normally said as a velar approximant – not even the “dark l” you hear at the end of “Bill”; the tongue really doesn’t usually touch at all, it just rises up in back. (The IPA for this sound is [ɰ].)

What that means is that you can say this word without lifting the very tip of your tongue at all. The front behind the tip lifts up for the final [i], but the tip stays behind the teeth. It’s nearly all velar action: opening aspirated /k/, low front /æ/, the /l/ reduced to the [ɰ], a /g/ and that long /r:/, and then /i/. The only time the lips move much is that slight rounding they do on the /r/, and maybe opening up a little extra on the /æ/.

So where does Calgary come from? Well, the fort the NWMP (later RCMP) founded here was first named Fort Brisebois, after an officer whose name shows up in a street name now, but an NWMP Colonel, James Macleod (who has a major street named after him, Macleod Trail – the big roads in Calgary are called Trail), named it after a place in Scotland, on the Isle of Mull. (Southern Alberta has a lot of Scottish heritage. I grew up expecting bagpipes at big formal occasions.) When I was a kid, I heard that Calgary actually meant ‘castle by the bay’. This turns out not to be true: there is a castle by the bay at Calgary in Scotland, but the name Calgary comes from Scots Gaelic Calgarraidh, which most likely comes from cala ghearraidh, ‘beach of the meadow’.

Calgary, Alberta, is not much known for meadows and not at all known for beaches, although it has some of each. But right now they’re generally under water. Not of the bay – of the Bow. Also the Elbow, Calgary’s other river. But it will pass.

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