Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
One thing I will add now is that Canadians seem to have a national character trait of going to extremely great lengths to avoid hurting other people's feelings, something which causes them to repress natural passive-aggressive tendencies (or perhaps it actually causes these tendencies).
Anyway, as a result of this it seems that many Canadians will then react rather badly when people don't seem to want to make the effort to exercise the same restraint that they do in trying to avoid hurting other people's feelings (namely theirs).
This can set off sparks with people from cultures where such restraint is not as common or expected.
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Yep, it's the frontier mentality. You don't have the time or the inclination for verbal games when you're pushing off into uncharted or recently charted territory with everything on the line. You need to know exactly what this or that guy over here or over there is up to, because everything is resting on it. A misunderstanding which might have been amusing to a London shopkeeper could have been disastrous to a young guy with a pregnant wife trying to tough out his first winter in the bush ten miles away from the nearest neighbour. We've got a ton of etymologically American sayings that spell this out:
"A man's word is his bond."
"Tell me plainly."
"Money talks, bullshit walks."
We're not pioneers anymore, but the mentality has persisted as a North American trait. Think about that last one: you would be hard pressed to find a single American who would disagree with its perceived wisdom, either whole-heartedly or cynically. And yet, what were the dockworkers in the East End doing for a couple centuries save for coming up with the "bullshit" of their rhyming slang? It's easy for distinctively stylized verbal patterns to emerge from centuries of stationary ferment, whereas, by contrast, it's a well-known linguistic fact that moving populations are extremely conservative with language.
The only famous North American exceptions are African-Americans and New York Jews, two demographic groups large enough to achieve critical linguistic mass who never had a stake in the North American frontier (and who come fairly close to rivalling the British and Irish in the inventiveness of their speech).
The power of the Roman church in ecclesiastical Quebec makes it an interesting exception to the North American rule, though. Those long, neat rows of cultivated land speak to a more established society than the rest of North America ever had. Seems to me that the general rule goes something like this: the more the fluctuation and uncertainty, the less the linguistic invention. And vice versa.
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My favourite YUL landmark, ruined.
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