James Harbeck

Perhaps it is fitting that the English language should use the Roman alphabet. English has passed through so many evolutions, with so many influences and borrowings, and its words have changed so much in meaning over time, it might as well use a borrowed alphabet that has just as checkered a history, and use it in an irregular and abnormal…

This book is a trick window. Tomson Highway, as we will see, is a Trickster and a window installer. Highway’s favourite character and metaphysical persona is “a cosmic clown, as he/she has been called, a merry-maker called the Trickster, Weesageechaak in Cree, Nanabush in Ojibway, Glooscap in Mi’kmaq, Iktomi in Lakota, Coyote on the plains, Raven on the west coast.” The Trickster shows up in Highway’s…

When I studied the history of English in university, there were three of us keeners who sat up at the front while the rest of the class cowered near the back. Every so often I would look back to see who was still there. Over the course of the year, their number diminished by at least…

English really is a perfectly Canadian language, an Anglo-Saxon base sea-changed by time and multicultural forces into something rich and strange. Howard Richler documents this fact amply in his new book Strange Bedfellows: The Private Lives of Words. He looks at the often anfractuous paths a bevy of words have taken to their present English senses—and many of…