How Language Changes

We’ve been through trauma in Calgary and southern Alberta, as flood waters poured across the land. It’s been an amazing story, of fear and heroics and compassion. Grief, and anger, too. And a weird thing has happened to our language.

We learned new vocabulary (cubic metres  per second is how water flow is measured. Also sewage, I think).  Words took on new meaning. Some we needed to avoid – the puns flowed deep and fast. There was a flood of puns. We were inundated with puns. It was raining puns, often unintentionally. Who knew we had so many water-based words? And new words emerged.

Our beloved Mayor Nenshi scolded people who were boating on a flooding river and endangering rescuers who might have to come after them. He said he was not allowed to use the nouns he wanted to use to describe them… and they came to be called nenshinouns. Don’t be a nenshinoun.

I’ve heard him referred to as His Awesomeness, as he became the face and voice of the emergency workers doing astounding things to protect the city. Into his second day without sleep, a twitter hashtag emerged – nap4nenshi – as people encouraged him to get some sleep. This spread to others who were working long hours – nap4yyc for emergency workers; nap4markusoff, one of the Calgary Herald reporters who was tweeting breaking news; even nap4maureen as I struggled to retweet breaking news on Facebook to keep friends up to date, either in Calgary and inundated with other stuff to deal with (yeah, another pun), or out of town and trying to follow the story.

There was a brief revival of nenvy ­­– envy of our wonderful mayor by other places who have less wonderful mayors (you know who you are).

As a writer, I found this fascinating. And a little painful, to learn from the inside out. I still wince at certain words, shy away from certain language. We’ve grown new prickles, all flood-based, and they’re reflected in our language. It’ll be interesting to look back in a year and see what has eased, and what persists. I suspect we’ll always have nenshinouns.

Maureen

#Calgary #yycfloods #MayorNenshi #nap4nenshi #nenshinouns #language

Life in Contrasts

After a month of rain, sometimes torrential, and then blistering heat (brief, thankfully), the garden is bursting with blooms. In the humid heat, so unusual for Calgary, the boxwood is bringing the fragrance of Spanish gardens. Roses surround it, and lavender will be blooming soon.

Squirrels are stealing peony flowers faster than they can open, even after I coated the stems with a little cayenne powder to deter them. But the garden is gorgeous anyway, green and lush and spangled with colour.

Of course, the bird chirping is accented by hammering, drowned out by the cement saw cutting the sidewalk next door, and frightened off by the squeaking of the never-oiled tracks on the excavator.

My life is lived in contrasts.

Maureen

The Quality of Light

The light keeps changing at my house.

When the neighbour’s beautiful spruce trees were cut down and the house demolished, we were flooded with west light. In the windows, in the garden. It was strange and delightful, but a bit of a worry, too. In the summer the west sun is very, very hot here, and we had no shelter from it. We have trees in our yard, but nothing to the west.

It didn’t matter, it turns out, as June was a deluge in Calgary (as you may have heard). The light was green and blue and dark as dusk; the rare sun joyous and strange. By the end of it we felt like moles, venturing into the too-bright sunlight.

Then the new house next door started to go up, and our light changed again. We have shade from the west now, but the walls aren’t solid, so light filters through. This morning, yellow-tinged morning light is reflecting off the wooden structure back into the west window in the office in a lovely glow.

I wish there was a way to capture that in writing. Perhaps there is. If I’ve written this well, there is.

Maureen