For the life of me, I cannot remember how to pronounce the word "radiator."
The radiator is a very important device in Canada. When I was wee, it was where children rushed first after recess in winter. You put your mittens on top of it, and you stuck your wet feet under it. In extreme situations, you might get permission to dry your socks on or under it. (I seem to recall that boots usually stayed out in the hall.) If the rad--we generally called it the rad--conked out, we got to go home.
I do not remember the rad having a central role in high school; and in high school we had lockers, anyway. Did the Abbey have central heating? I simply do not remember. On one glorious occasion the boiler itself conked out, so we all got to go home.
Old houses in Edinburgh and environs do not have central heating, so radiators again play an important role in my life. I am thinking of one stately room in particular in which I always make a beeline for the rad and lean against it, comfortably toasting my bottom.
Anyway, at lunch yesterday I was discussing my old friend the radiator, when an English musician interrupted me to say that the word was pronounced not "rah-di-ay-derr" but "ray-di-ay-teh." Then he did a rather savage imitiation of my Toronto accent which to me sounded rather Australian. I know Canadians sound a bit Scottish to Americans (see South Park), but it didn't occur to me that we might sound Australian to the English. When they play Canadians (like Lord Beaverbrook), they generally use a most unconvincing pan-USA accent.
Now, I am not really in a position to complain because I carry a notebook everywhere and write down the beautiful eccentricities of Scottish speech. I also have a brother with perfect pitch, so I know that some noises actually drive musicians, like dogs, insane. Finally, I have forgiving spirit, choosing not to hold grudges against otherwise lovely people who correct my English but to blog about them instead. Hee hee!
But now I have been obsessively wondering if Torontonians really do say "rah-di-ay-derr" or if that is just me. Perhaps we normally say "ray-di-ay-derr"? Please write in the combox where you grew up and how you pronounce "radiator."
One thing I will complain about is when people watch South Park and actually believe that Canadians say "aboot" for "about" and "hoose" for "house" and sound anything like Terrence and Philip. Americans might be forgiven for this, especially if they are from upstate New York, because the contrast between the upstate New York accent and southern Ontario accent is certainly acute. But Scots have absolutely no right whatsoever to believe that Canadian say "aboot" or "hoose." We don't; many of them do.
I once offered to go and get my accent scrubbed, but my husband wouldn't let me. Apparently accent-adjusting is right out of fashion, and anyway nobody ever taught people how to sound more Scottish. Generally they taught them how to sound like a 1930s BBC radio announcer. I would not at all like to sound like a 1930s BBC radio announcer, but I would love to be able to sound like my favourite cashier at Scotmid and call other women "hen" convincingly. It is part of the Canadian character to wish to fit seemlessly into foreign societies; we like a certain amount of invisibility. We are part hobbit, really.
Alas, I will never pass for Scottish. Deaf old cab drivers peer at me when I slip into the back seat and ask me if I'm Irish. This is not the super-fantabulous thing to be in Edinburgh as it is in Toronto or Boston or South Bend, alas.
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22 comments:
I'm Toronto born and bred, and I've always pronounced it rad-ee-ay-derr, with the accent on the rad.
This drives my American cousins insane. "Heat doesn't rad-i-ate," they cry, "heat ray-di-ates! Your accent is illogical!" To which I shrug my shoulders. There's no logical reason for me to call my home city "Trahna", either, nor my current city "Oddwa" but there you have it.
Betwixt North London and Edinburgh and I say ray-day-ay-tor. My father was Canadian and I think he pronounced it the same way.
I also get accused of being Irish or Gaelic. I have never been to Ireland and no nearer to Gaeldom than a boat trip to Mull. On the other hand, back when we worried about the IRA, I was picked up by British Transport Police in KX because someone had complained about a woman with an Irish accent behaving suspiciously. I still can't remember what I was doing.
Ray-dee-a-ter. But mostly "rad".
Aged P
Christine, thank you! What a relief! (I call them T'ronno and Oddawa, myself.)
Margaret, the scariness! Do you have "an Irish face" ? I have "an Irish face." I would be hard-pressed to explain to an irate Irishman what I mean by "an Irish face," but I have one.
I'm from Eastern Ontario and I have always pronounced it ray-di-ay-der. I do remember those winter school days hanging our mitts on the radiator. Our school must have had a good heating system though because I don't ever remember being sent out because the radiator conked out.
I used either one. Raydeeaiter. raadeeaiterr. Probably borrowed from "the rad," "radical," "Radisson," "radish" or possibly, like many Ontario pronunciations, borrowed from the French.
True stories: I'm, like, totally T'rontonian. However, a Mississauga bus driver (I believe originally from the subcontinent) asked me if I was Australian. A Montreal taxi driver pegged me as a Romanian.
Ben voyons donc!
NS
Surely radiators are a sign of having central heating?
I'm from southern lower peninsula Michigan, and call it a "ray-di-ay-derr." I miss having one at my house! Most houses I lived in when I was in MN had one, which was lovely.
Dare I brag on this?: I visited Dun Laughaire, Ireland, for a few days (no more than a week) back in the mid-90s. On the recommendation of friends, I was seeking to visit a certain priest. I asked a passerby (somewhat elderly lady) where to find St. Michael's, and she paused and looked at me funny. Really paused! So I apologized, whereupon she recollected herself and said, "No, it's fine, dear! I just thought from your accent that you lived here!"
O, if I could wear a video on a button... :)
I'm with your agéd P on raydiator/rads.
My accent is or was so odd that it turned heads in the street, though I too have been suspected of Irishness at moments. I find it less surprising in my case than yours because the Ottawa Valley has a long history of Scotch Irish settlement and the accent here reflects this. But I believe that to be true to a lesser degree of all of southern Ontario, so perhaps that's why. (Though I don't understand it in the case of the Michigan correspondent, above...)
Clio
Berenike, B.A. also lodged a protest and explained to me what "central heating" means in Britain. I never thought about it much. I basically thought that a warm house that you keep warm with a thermostat on the wall meant a house with central heating, and a house that is cold and draughty, with no handy thermostat on the wall to turn up, did not have central heating.
We don't have central heating, by either sense of the term. However, the storage heaters are sort of like rads, in that I can lean on them and dry things under them.
Clio,
I think it's only due to the ability, bestowed upon most of my family, to imitate sounds (music, accents, vocal mannerisms) easily. My brother (the best of us at it) once read to me from a dull novel, using, in succession, a British, Scottish, Irish, Australian, American South, and Bostonese accent.
I pronounce it "Shut yer maouth, punk," because I'm from Belligerent Small Town, Angry State, USA. Our main exports are the chips on our shoulders and amusing pronunciations.
Thank you for pointing out the bizarre "Canadian" accents on BBC! I get so confused, especially when they sound like a blend of NYC and Texas, claim to be Torontonian, and are sometimes, according to IMDB, even played by native Canadians.
Are the Canadians hired to play Canadians, I wonder, and then told their accents are not convincing enough? The mind boggles.
I'm originally from Pennsylvania, but right on the border with upstate New York, and the accent in our area adds t's to some words (ray-dee-ay-tor) and takes t's out of others (ki-in instead of kitten) which drives my half- British husband insane.
Does the use of "aye" to punctuate every comment/ question count as an accent? Our Canadian priest probably could not go more then 3 sentences without using it...
No, Seraphic, it's definitely my accent... I have a lilt. An Irish face sounds like a nice thing to have and in your case I imagine your hair goes a long way towards reinforcing the idea of Irishness with people.
Also I lied about my father. My Canadian cousins tell me he did not distinguish between d's and t's the way I do.
cat:
I believe the word you are looking for is "eh", eh?
There is one thing about all this that most people forget, even Canadians. There is no such thing as a "Canadian accent" or I should say, "the" Canadian accent.
The weird hootings that made up the mockery of the putatively Canadian accent were completely incomprehensible to me when they appeared in the mid 1980s on that silly show...what was it called? Not Wayne's World, but that other stupid thing with the two guys and the beer. Anyway, people all of a sudden started claiming that Canadians all talked this "aboot" business and said "eh", and for the life of me, I could not figure out what they were all blithering about. No one in my entire life had ever spoken that way in my presence.
It was not until many years later that I came to Ontario and began to understand. Most Americans, (and Brits, for that matter) assume that the "Canadian" accent is that of a small pocket of the popuation with whom they are most familiar: to wit, Southwestern Ontario. I had never in my life heard anyone talk like that (the way the "Canadian" accent was suddenly being depicted on American television shows) until I went to Southwestern Ontario... and suddenly it all became clear. The SW Ontario accent is indeed heavily influenced by the Scots who administered the place (Calvinist presbies all, and virulently anti-Catholic, btw).
I have something that is extremely rare: a native Victorian accent. I was raised, as were most of my contemporaries, by first time English immigrants in a colonial town almost completely isolated from the outside world. No one came to Victoria in the 1960s and '70s .... except American tourists up on the ferry from Seattle.
Victoria was a sleepy little place with a lot of old ladies in flowered hats and near-parodic English colonial types, all somehow overlooked by the modern world since circa WWI. I therefore sound "English" to the Canadians, and even some of my English relatives said that I spoke near enough with an English (though not London or Cheshire) accent that they didn't mind.
I also went to live for four years in the Maritimes and have spent some time in northern Quebec and New Brunswick, where even when they are speaking English, you can't tell. In Mirimichi the country people speak with a weird combination of Irish, French and Cree or Algonquin... dear heavens!
I do wish the rest of the world would get their collective heads out of their derriers about Canada. The county is HUGE. English people have no conception of a place that takes a week to drive across (without any overnight breaks). I once calculated the equivalent distance, and it is about that between London and Burma.
The regional differences are equally vast because the different waves of immigrants came and settled in groups in different parts of the country and usually in different centuries.
This idiotic thing with "aboot" and "eh" just infuriates me.
Well said, Hilary. I always heard Victoria was a very old-fashioned English place, but no doubt that has changed since you grew up, alas. Is it mini-Vancouver now?
I do say "eh" especially when nervous--e.g. being interviewed by potential American roommates in the USA, as they later informed me. I am reasonably sure, having lived for almost two years in Scotland, that we southern-Ontarians got this from Scotland.
I overheard extremely loud Canadian voices on an Edinburgh bus one day. No-one would sit near these girls except me. And while I played the age-old guessing game of "Yank or Canuck?", they referred to both Tim Horton's and "Van-queue-ver." Only BC people say "Van-queue-ver," which must be one of the ugliest noises in the English-speaking world.
My think my accent is identical to that of Margaret Atwood, famously a Toronto Annex-dweller. When I saw and heard a video of myself online, all I could think was "Margaret Atwood."
I like my brother's explanation for the Toronto "rah-dee-ay-dor," which is that Ontario English has been corrupted by French. Makes a nice change!
I believe you will find that the correct pronunciation of the name of that big city on the west coast is,
"Vaing-Queue-verrr"
I had a very strange experience in a pub in Chester once. I was sitting over a pint and a ploughman's lunch reading the paper when it slowly dawned on me that the voices I was hearing were oddly familiar. I put the paper down and listened for a few minutes and realised what it was. They were not only Canadian tourists, but they spoke with an accent identical to mine...the accent I had heard all my life until I was twenty and have so rarely heard anywhere since.
I got up and spoke to them and I was right, they were indeed both native Victorians on holiday, visiting relatives. They were also the first generation of children born to recent English immigrants whose relatives came from the same part of Cheshire as did mine.
It was extremely strange. As though I had met long-lost relations.
I have to get in on this one! Was just ranting the other day that some of my colleagues and pupils here in a particular part of Scotland with its own language, traditions, etc don't really seem to "get" that Canada is a big, diverse country and I am from one particular part with its own distinct accent, lexicon, traditions, etc -- which mainly derive from the particular part of Scotland in which I now reside. Two recent examples: being asked what I would eat for a Canadian Christmas dinner -- as in would it include maple sugar pie. I snapped that there was I didn't know what a typical Canadian dinner was and that we never had maple syrup in the house when I was growing up. And a pupil taking about visiting Vancouver -- "How was it?" I asked him. "You know; you've been there," he replied. "No I haven't; that's like you saying you've been to Japan," I told him.
And the accent thing -- sometimes it feels like false advertising to be walking around and having people assume that I sound like the "typical Canadian." And people can make some interesting assumptions, too. When I first came to my present school, I had spoken to a class briefly when a pupil raised his hand and said, "Are you from the Republic or the North, Miss?"
I also didn't get the central heating thing here. I still really don't. I thought you had to have a furnace in the house, but I guess not.
Interesting. I go to a certain university in South Bend, IN, but am originally from the Philadelphia area. I pronounce the word for a heating unit "rad-ee-ader." It's incredible how you need to go a few hundred miles from home to learn that you have an accent.
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