Stone Soup by Jan Eliot for April 27, 2010

I know several Canadians, and none of them say “eh” all that much. Or are anywhere near that nosy.

Take off, Rina!

Sounds more like she’s from Wisconsin…

Sounds like she’s JEALOUS and not “getting any”!

Hey! It’s only a comic strip.

I KNEW it! I am a Canadian, and I say “eh” all the time, but it’s always been my contention that people in other countries say it too.

Boss behind her: “Don’t you have work to do, eh?”

So begins the rumor patrol.

SuperRobot234 – I think she IS the boss.

I always thought That Canadiens saying eh at the end of the sentence was some sort of joke. Then one year just before Memorial Day as I was placing flags on veterans graves, I saw the stone carver putting dates on some stones. I talked with him some, found out he was from southern Quebec, and I’ll be darned if he didn’t say eh at the end of each sentence.

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LOL!!

Hi pibfan! Hows everyone ? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ StoneSoup: Val’s Boss reminds me of This

Speaking as a Canadian, I am tired of that silly stereotype…we do NOT say “eh” every other word., Eh!…Say ..When does the ChicagoBlack Hawks/Vancouver Canucks series start??? GO ‘NUCKS GO!

It’s more of a Quebec or East Coast( Newfoundland) thing. Being from BC we don’t say it so much…eh. LOl :D

earodrig thanks I will try and look that up today.

Where I work at she would be wrote up as that type of talk would be considered bad.

I think this comic strip takes place in Wisconsin… so “eh” is not at all unbelievable… I have found that as you get closer to the Canadian border, our dialects do tend to sound alike. (I’m from Michigan, and have lived in both Minnesota and Wisconsin as well.)

I’ve known Canadians who spoke like Bob and Doug, and Canadians that didn’t. I’ve also known people from the Northern Midwest (Michigan to the Dakotas) who spoke with similar accents and tics, but not truly identical.

Anyway, the story goes that when they were trying to figure out a name for their country, representatives from Toronto, Halifax, and Vancouver could not reach an agreement. So they decided they’d each pull a random Scrabble tile out of a bag, and accept whatever name they came up with…

“‘C’, eh?” ”‘N’, eh?” ”‘D’, eh?”

Oh, now I get it. I thought someone was speaking to me. Several someones. But they mean the character in the cartoon. And anyway her name is spelled Rena, and mine isn’t. You notice things like that.

@Ccoghlan, eh??

@vanpelt, I never saw such a collection of euphemisms since the last time a comic strip tried to tackle the issues of sex. There are heavy rules of censorship, I guess. I enjoy cartoons in university student papers because they don’t seem to have such rules.

Anyway, I think time is pretty elastic in a comic strip. In some of them, time never passes. Everybody is always the same age. In others, time moves along, but more slowly than in real life. This comic strip has a mixture - some of the kids grow older faster, some slower - or different speeds at different times. Eh?

So I don’t think you need to worry about how long they have been going out together without having sex. Just put it down to, what’s that expression, “poetic licence”? “prosaic justice”? anyway, you know what I mean. It’s just not an issue.

How about “comic license”?

There are some things we can say in the comments that Jan can’t say in the strip, like “Val and Phil, two consenting but unmarried adults, engaged in sexual intercourse.” There are some things Jan can say in the strip that we can’t say in the comments, like bleeep, bleeep, and bleeep.

Funny, ain’t it?

My friends in Quebec and Ontario get irritated too, and rightly so. But they get their own back. They’ve sent me some Canadian stories about us that can jar us into seeing things from their point of view…and also happen to be pretty funny.

Val is a hypocrite – she has grilled Joan and Rena and Eve about their romances! (And Holly, but…) Now she’s mad? She doesn’t have to tell anyone anything, but she should take their nosiness as natural!