Isn't it marvellous?

by: Melinda Mattos

November 07, 2008 8:00 AM

Comments: (2)

Joe Clark is angry. To those familiar with the Toronto writer’s previous exploits — such as his campaigns to improve closed-captioning on television and preserve old TTC typography and the many snippy letters to the editor he’s sent EYE WEEKLY — this may not come as a surprise. But perhaps the specifics will.

Clark was reading Design City: Toronto (John Wiley & Sons, 2007), already annoyed by the book’s “questionable premise that interior design and starchitecture make Toronto notable,” when he found something else to be ticked off about. While it was a book about Toronto, featuring the work of Toronto writers and photographers, it was published in the UK, with UK punctuation and spelling — all the way down to using the five-syllable “aluminium” in place of “aluminum.”

“Is there anyone in this city who thinks that the Royal Ontario Museum addition is clad in aluminium?” he laughs, recounting the story over the phone.

Fuelled by this annoyance, he did what any tech-savvy word nerd might do: he wrote an e-book.

Clark’s treatise, Organizing Our Marvellous Neighbours: How to Feel Good About Canadian English, sets out to prove that while we’ve adopted spellings from both UK and US English, the resulting amalgam is a distinctly Canadian version of the language. (You’ll find a few sly spelling examples contained within the title, Organizing Our Marvellous Neighbours.)

As Clark writes, it’s a book that he hopes will eliminate “doubts that Canadian English is real, doubts that Canadian English spellings are real, doubts about what spelling to use.”

But, wait, hasn’t the Canadian Oxford Dictionary already done that? Clark argues that, while the book is a valuable resource with which he agrees most of the time, Oxford is “too institutional and too slow.” So he’s compiled his own original research, systematically combing through Canadian blogs, novels, business directories and legal results to see how Canadians actually spell. A sampling of the results are included in his e-book, with the rest available online.

Clark has uncanny timing. He released Organizing Our Marvellous Neighbours in late September, just one week before the entire staff of the Canadian Oxford was laid off.
Company president David Stover blamed the layoffs on the rise of online dictionaries and the dwindling sales of print editions, but Clark questions that logic. He points out that the Oxford English Dictionary — which costs over £4 million annually to produce — has always been a prestige project for Oxford University Press, rather than a revenue source.

At around the same time the Canadian staff was let go, Oxford was flying American bloggers to the UK to celebrate the dictionary’s 80th anniversary.

“If the reason for shitcanning the Canadian staff was [lack of revenue],” Clark says, “well, your entire project isn’t revenue-producing in the first place.”

Though electronic dictionaries may be edging out print, Clark says there’s one technology that can’t be trusted: “The biggest threat to Canadian spelling is not Hollywood but Microsoft Word, essentially: spellcheckers.” As he illustrates in his e-book, though we’ve come to rely on them to catch and correct our errors, no major spellchecker gets Canadian English right.

And on that note, perhaps the most valuable part of the whole project is Clark’s spelling cheat sheet, which boils down the major rules of Canadian English into a single page — marvellous for pinning up at your desk.

Organizing our Marvellous Neighbours is available for $17.83 at http://en-ca.org/buy/.

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Isn't it marvellous?