Amusing insult

[pne]

My, that woman has more chins than a Chinese phone book!

From an amusing site purporting to teach Canadian English.

Comments

[ubykhlives.livejournal.com]

I like the Canadian sense of humour. It's much more British than it is American.

[robnorth.livejournal.com]

The scary part about that site is its accuracy. I forget how many Canadianisms I use until I see a site like this. "About yay wide" is one I use a lot, along with "beauty", "hoser", and the ubiquitous "eh". And I do pronounce the name of my birthplace "Tronna".

I'd forgotten about "sook" (wimp, crybaby). It's more of an Eastern term; I remember picking it up from other kids when I'd go on vacation to my grandparents' in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. It's short for "sooky baby". Same oo sound as "look" in both short and long versions. "Stop complainin', ya sook."

And I often forget that the use of "the show" for "cinema, movies" is very Canadian. I use it all the time, but I don't think anyone outside Canada uses it. "Let's go to the show, eh?"

As for "chins than a Chinese phone book", you can now say "than a Vancouver phone book", or (to be especially precise) "than a Richmond phone book". Richmond — the suburb of Vancouver where the airport is located, immediately south of Vancouver proper — has a hunormous (another Canajanism) Chinese population. Some strip malls have not a single English sign on them. IIRC, Chinese is now the 3rd most common mother tongue in Canada, behind (of course) English and French, having overtaken Italian a couple of decades ago.

Canadian English is an underappreciated dialect of the language, fer sure, eh?

[bride.livejournal.com]

That's a funny site =)

Those are very East Coast pronunciations and it's insanely out of date =)