Moose Mail™🗺️ Regional Treasures
Words that belong to a place. Learn the local one before you visit, and you will make friends fast.
bunny hug
A hooded sweatshirt. In Saskatchewan it is not a hoodie, it has never been a hoodie, and it will fight the word hoodie in a parking lot. The rest of Canada is slowly coming around.
jambuster
A jelly-filled doughnut. Manitoba looked at the humble jelly doughnut and gave it a name with some muscle behind it.
wedding social
A ticketed party held before a wedding to help the couple pay for it: music, dancing, raffle prizes and a whole community buying tickets. Romance, funded democratically.
dépanneur
The corner store, known to everyone in Quebec as the dep. Milk, snacks, lottery tickets and late-night rescue missions all live here.
b'y
Short for boy, used for absolutely everyone, of every age and gender, usually with warmth. “Yes b'y” is agreement, encouragement and punctuation in two small letters.
toutons
Puffs of bread dough fried golden and served with molasses or butter, a Newfoundland breakfast worth crossing an ocean for. Leftovers do not exist. Science cannot explain it.
screech
The island's famous dark rum, and the star of the screech-in, the ceremony where visitors kiss a cod, take a shot, and become honorary Newfoundlanders.
mummering
The holiday tradition of dressing in disguise, visiting neighbours' kitchens, and making them guess who you are before the music starts. Strange, joyful and centuries old.
Jiggs dinner
The classic boiled dinner: salt beef, cabbage, potatoes, carrots and pease pudding, all in one pot. Sunday in Newfoundland has tasted like this for generations.
figgy duff
A steamed raisin pudding, traditionally boiled right alongside the Jiggs dinner in its own cloth bag. It sounds like a tall tale and tastes like Sunday.
tuckamore
The dense, wind-bent spruce and fir that grow along the coast, sculpted by salt wind into green waves frozen mid-crash. Some stands are centuries old and barely knee high.
kitchen party
The best room at any East Coast gathering: the kitchen, where the fiddles come out, the chairs get pushed back, and the party improves with every person who squeezes in.
come from away
Anyone who is not from here, said with genuine welcome. A hit musical borrowed the phrase and carried it around the world, which the Atlantic provinces find fair enough.
bluenoser
A Nova Scotian, named for the province's seafaring days. The most famous Bluenoser of all, the racing schooner Bluenose, has sailed on the back of the dime since 1937.
rappie pie
A grated potato dish baked until the top goes crisp and golden, beloved in Acadian communities in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Making it is a group project and a point of pride.
terrasse
What the rest of the country calls a patio. In Montreal, in either language, it is a terrasse, and filling one on the first warm evening of spring is a civic duty.
steamé
A hot dog steamed until the bun goes soft, then loaded, classically all-dressed with mustard, onion and slaw. An all-dressed steamé is Montreal lunch architecture at its finest.
gitch
Underwear. Also heard as gotch. A plain word doing honest work across Manitoba and Saskatchewan, usually announced by mothers during laundry emergencies.
sourdough
Not the bread: a seasoned northerner, someone who has wintered in the Yukon and come out the other side. The name rides in from the gold rush, when starter dough travelled everywhere its owner did.
cheechako
A newcomer to the North, still learning which ice is trustworthy and why everyone owns three kinds of gloves. Every sourdough started as one.
Chinook
A warm, dry wind that rolls off the Rockies and can raise the temperature dramatically in a few hours, melting snow mid-winter. Older Blackfoot tradition calls it the snow eater, which is exactly right.