In English please?

[The Wizard of BC]

Hey consider yourself lucky. I have found myself in a country that although one of its official languages is English they say things like "Please queue at the wicket opposite."
That's Canadian Postal Dude talk for "Yo, dummy, you're in the wrong line. Go stand over there!"

I also have trouble with Pour1Malts posts. So I just look at the pictures, nod, and jump to the next thread. It was two years before I knew who this Robertson guy everyone talks about was.

He does have a good collection of Scotch though, so I guess I'll keep trying to figure it all out.

[Peter C.]

Hey consider yourself lucky. I have found myself in a country that although one of its official languages is English they say things like "Please queue at the wicket opposite."
That's Canadian Postal Dude talk for "Yo, dummy, you're in the wrong line. Go stand over there!"

I also have trouble with Pour1Malts posts. So I just look at the pictures, nod, and jump to the next thread. It was two years before I knew who this Robertson guy everyone talks about was.

He does have a good collection of Scotch though, so I guess I'll keep trying to figure it all out.

I have wondered what the language is like in Canada. In England we say queue rather than line, but wicket is new to me unless it is a post like a wicket in cricket.

When I first came to the US to visit my wife-to-be we found ourselves in the KFC opposite Gracelands in Memphis. We went to order and the woman behind the counter recited the menu to us. When she finished I said to my fiancee, I will have the same as you, as I did not understand one single word the woman had said.

Peter

[ronstew]

I have wondered what the language is like in Canada. In England we say queue rather than line, but wicket is new to me unless it is a post like a wicket in cricket.

When I first came to the US to visit my wife-to-be we found ourselves in the KFC opposite Gracelands in Memphis. We went to order and the woman behind the counter recited the menu to us. When she finished I said to my fiancee, I will have the same as you, as I did not understand one single word the woman had said.

Peter

Actually, Peter, Steve was exaggerating. It was funny, but apparently misleading. Given that 90% of Canadians live withing 100 miles of the USA border and we have been exposed to US mass-media for our whole lives, our linguistic idiosyncrasies have mostly vanished - merged into a sort of Los Angeles/New York universal American English. Part of the issue is that kids always think "the other" is better, so they imitate US spelling and pronunciation.

By the way, you will find that the cricket definition for wicket is the third in The Concise Oxford Dictionary. The usage Steve refers to once was common in England. In the case of a post office or bank, the wicket is the little window through which you make your transactions. This just proves that language evolves.

If you took 50 people born and raised in Canada in the last 40 years, I doubt that more than twenty would know any definition for wicket, and of those twenty, I'd guess that seventeen would have the cricket definition.

[Peter C.]

Actually, Peter, Steve was exaggerating. It was funny, but apparently misleading. Given that 90% of Canadians live withing 100 miles of the USA border and we have been exposed to US mass-media for our whole lives, our linguistic idiosyncrasies have mostly vanished - merged into a sort of Los Angeles/New York universal American English. Part of the issue is that kids always think "the other" is better, so they imitate US spelling and pronunciation.

By the way, you will find that the cricket definition for wicket is the third in The Concise Oxford Dictionary. The usage Steve refers to once was common in England. In the case of a post office or bank, the wicket is the little window through which you make your transactions. This just proves that language evolves.

If you took 50 people born and raised in Canada in the last 40 years, I doubt that more than twenty would know any definition for wicket, and of those twenty, I'd guess that seventeen would have the cricket definition.

Thank you for the clarification Ron. You made me reach for my dictionary. I have an Oxford English dictionary from Britain and a US Oxford dictionary which is still packed from our move.

The British one puts the cricket definition first.
The second is a small door in a large door (like a hanger sliding door) so that people can enter without opening the large door.
The third says a meaning in the USA is a small opening in a door or wall, usually closed with a sliding door, so I guess that covers the post office window.

So our languages are quite different.

I probably have more relatives in Canada than I have in the UK but the last person in my family to meet our Canadian relatives was my aunty about thirty years ago. I don't even have any addresses.

Peter