She Cape Speared Me

A mixed experience of good and bad on a lovely day at Cape Spear

Transcript

Hi, I’m Wayne Jones. Welcome to Newfoundland Boy, a podcast about the Canadian province of Newfoundland. This is episode 40: “She Cape Speared Me.”

One of the biggest attractions on the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland, and in fact on the whole island, is Cape Spear, which famously and accurately bills itself as the most easterly point in North America. I visited there last Sunday. It is only about a twenty-minute drive south and of course east of St. John’s, the capital city, where I live.

It was a mixed visit. The good thing that happened was that I got to see the ocean and the horizon on a warm and breezy day. The bad thing was the woman in the heritage gift shop. Let me get the bad part over with.

Bad is too mild a word for it. I found it disappointing and angering. The problem is that it happened fast and was all over before I figured out what was really going on. I was in the shop with a friend checking out the souvenirs of all kinds in there. It’s a small place but I’m sure they had hundreds of different items in there. One was something you typically see in almost any shop that caters to tourists: knickknacks of all sorts that have what you might call “Newfoundland sayings” on them. That is, to say it a little formally, things that have quotes from one or other of the various variations of English in the province.

I noticed an object that said Crooked as Sin, and it was a saying I am familiar with, but I said to my friend that you don’t hear it much any more. By the way, the word crooked means in Newfoundland “ill-tempered, cross, cranky.” And the Dictionary of Newfoundland English provide a great example: “I don’t know what it is. People are either too lazy, too crooked or too tired to park in the designated parking zones.” And I say: Lar tunderin Jesus, you’re right about dat, my son!

And just to dwell on this meaning for a little bit, I’m not quite sure how the phrase means cranky. The word sin in Newfoundland can typically have two different meanings. One is the same as in standard English, that is, a bad thing that God doesn’t want you to do and if you do too many of them you may end up spending the afterlife in the other, hotter place. But the other meaning is to describe something you regret or something that’s a small shame. Here it is in a sentence quoted as an example from the dictionary: “’Tis a sin … t’ waste good hay like that.”

So, back to the woman in the gift shop. She overheard me saying that the phrase wasn’t used much anymore, and spoke up to say that it is still used. I took that as a friendly correction, even a service, to someone who has been away from the island for a while and so might not be totally up to date on what’s current and what’s not. I continued browsing in the shop and came upon another saying, stay where you’re at. It’s actually a phrase that would be understandable even in standard English, but I remembered that it was part of a longer saying. And when I got home I verified that in fact it’s used in a song by the famous Newfie singer Dick Nolan, where the refrain is, “Don’t stay where you’re to, come where we’re at.”

[quote from YouTube clip]

The woman had moved on a little by now, but she was obviously still listening, because when I misquoted it as “Don’t stay where you are,” she corrected me. And then said that her husband was a Newfoundlander and so she knew. I told her she was right.

It was a sunny and happy day, we were looking at funny sayings, and these exchanges both took place in probably less than a minute. It was only when she was gone and I had left the store that I realized what had happened. She wasn’t giving me information in a gentle and friendly way. No. She was assuming I was not from Newfoundland and that I was one of the scores of tourists there that day, and I happened to be one who was all fancy and thought he knew more about Newfoundland English than he really did. I consider it a very ugly form of defensiveness on her part, in which someone who is not from Newfoundland has no business trying to say what’s what about the language or anything else. It disturbed me more the more I thought about it as we wandered around outside.

The thing is, at least in my experience, this is very distinctive behaviour on the part of some Newfoundlanders—I experienced it once before at the Marine Atlantic station in North Sydney, Nova Scotia—but it is also very rare. Or at least not voiced often. Newfoundlanders generally are the friendly sort you hear about all the time, very laid back, unassuming, unpretentious. It’s one of the great things about living here. But you do come across this critical and defensive streak in some people now and then. Not pretty.

As for the rest of the wandering around the Cape Spear site, it was lovely. The weather was sunny and there was a warm breeze. There were lots of people around, partly I think because of a tour bus. The view is pretty great because straight ahead you can see the open ocean leading to the horizon, where the water and the sky seem to meet. And to your left you can see one of the other great sights and sites, in both spellings (S-I-G-H-T and S-I-T-E), Cabot Tower, sitting on top of Signal Hill. See some photos in the show notes.

And that’s all for this episode. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, consider giving me a like or adding a comment. And please join me again next Saturday.