Walter S. Avis

So eh? is Canadian, eh?

In a somewhat condescending review of A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles some years ago, Mavor Moore complained about “a slighting of spoken practice and of distinctive Canadian syntax,” among his objections being the absence of an entry for eh? , for “both the English and the Americans can spot a Canadian from his ‘eh?’ at the end of a sentence: ‘It’s hot, eh?’” Admittedly, the interjection is not in the DC ; moreover, there are no slips for eh? in the citation files of the Lexicographical Centre for Canadian English. This situation certainly indicates that the readers for the DC did not consider it a Canadianism: either that or they were unaware that eh? might be relevant to the collection. The second of these possibilities may be set aside, for eh? is, in fact, entered in the Intermediate Dictionary and the Senior Dictionary , general dictionaries of English published in Canada for Canadians as part of the Dictionary of Canadian English series, to which the DC belongs. It should be added that eh? is also entered in every general dictionary of English, both British and American, on my shelves—a very considerable collection indeed, and one which includes the Oxford English Dictionary and Webster’s New International Dictionary (Third Edition).

Notes on Borrow(ing) Pit

I first heard the term borrow pit during a visit to Spalding, Saskatchewan in the late 1940s, when the adjacent highway was being rebuilt to modern specifications, asphalt surfacing and all. A short time earlier, my brotherin-law had given the Department of Highways permission to remove from one of his fields near the road a large amount of fill to be used in building up the roadbed. He was left with an enormous pit, which later became valuable to him as a man-made watering-hole for his cattle and a pond for his geese; that is, it became a dugout, of which there are many on the prairies. I later learned that there were thousands of such pits strung along the railways and highways (and nowadays pipelines) of Canada.1