The most Canadian saying might not be from Canada, eh?

The Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles is drier than August in Osoyoos. The first edition was published in 1967, a most and highly Canadian year, by Charles Lovell and Walter Avis, who give a “you forgot to assign the homework” energy.

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Linguists of the day looked up to Avis, who considered it a mission to establish Canadian English as a distinct but related branch of the parent language. That said, he did not offer the same respect to “eh,” noting Americans and Canadians seemed to be hallucinating any real connection between the term, a holdover from British English, and our national identity.

This is where the headline starts to make sense, eh? The third and current edition of the DCHP, released last May, notes that Canada and Bob and Doug McKenzie’s favourite epitaph were first connected in an academic sense by Harold Allen in 1959. Allen argued it was so strong and free that border agents listened for it as a distinct indicator they were in fact dealing with a hewer of wood or drawer of water.

That story is a lot of fun but fell short of the bar set by Lovell and Avis for the first DCHP, so eh wasn’t included. But by DCHP-2, issued in 2017 by a team at the University of British Columbia, Rick Moranis, Dave Thomas and SCTV had long since made their mark. The dictionary’s exhaustive passage on eh aptly covers the “considerable” contribution of everyone’s favourite hosers to the popularization of the term, including the creation of the Bob and Doug Canadian Culture Grant by the “National Identity Committee of Canada and the Federation of Quebec” in 1982 for “any student who can prove killing more than three people who have used the words ‘hoser’ or ‘eh’ more than twice in a single conversation.”

The DCHP-3 also tells a tale of eh peppering the speech of the residents of Aklavik, in the Northwest Territories (emphasis on the northwest). A reference dated 1946 claims “‘Eh?’ was added to almost all statements of fact, particularly in explanatory narrative, as in ‘I’m going to put two 14 inch planks across the gunnels and pile the two by sixes on top of them, eh?’”

Any stigma attached to the utterance’s proletarian connotations have since dissipated. Today, “eh?” is a perfectly acceptable way for, say, a seasoned journalist to end a question posed to a cabinet minister.

The proof is in the podcasts, and the Pilsner: “The second most ‘Canadian’ term, after ‘eh?’ is ‘two-four,’” Moosehead brewery chief executive Derek Oland told the Ottawa Citizen in 2003. “As in: ‘Strap that two-four to the back of the Ski-Doo, eh?’”

No arguments from Aklavik there.

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