I’m currently sitting in a fancy house in Londontown, a la Gwen Stefani. (London is a town two hours away from Toronto.) I never really appreciated the differences between Canadians and Americans until now. For brevity’s sake, I’ll be doing another series of shorts to illustrate my point.
Pronouncing the “ou” properly
Americans have this strange habit of pronouncing “ou” as “OW” (like the exclamation of pain), as in “abOWt” and “hOWse”. Canadians pronounce the “u” as an “oo”, so they’re actually truer to the spelling. But it still sounds really funny.
It’s like they’re British or something
Canada is what the U.K. would be like if it were transported to the sprawling plains of North America and if their accents were less posh-sounding. Signs and everything look American, except that everything’s in kilometers and kilograms and degrees Celsius, and the words are mostly British, like “colour” and “mum” and “fish and chips”. Oh, and all of the packages in grocery stores have labels in both English and French. But it’s weird French– who the hell translates “candy” as “friandise”?
My brain’s fried right now, so I’ll save the rest for later, when I’m not traveling with my mother and when I’m in Quebec, where the Francophones sound like quacking ducks.
