The Citizen, 2010-02-25, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2010. PAGE 5.
M ay I politely request that from this
day on everyone drop the term
“Newfie”? It is as objectionable to
Newfoundlanders as the other “N” word is to
black people.
– Letter to the editor, January 2010
Um, with all due respect: no it’s not and no
I won’t. I’ve never met a Newfoundlander who
objected to the label; nor have I ever heard any
outlander use the term sneeringly or hatefully.
Where I come from, Newfie is a term of
endearment.
As for comparison with the other N word,
please remember that Dick Gregory, the black
comedian, chose to call his best-selling
autobiography Nigger. As he explained to his
mother in the forward to the book, “Always
remember, Mom, when you overhear the word
‘nigger’ that they’re advertising my book.”
And anyway I get nervous when people start
declaring which words can and can’t be used.
Nothing good can come of that. Words don’t
own us. It’s the other way around.
Besides, it’s too late to proscribe this
particular ‘N’ word. The term bestrides the
world like a grinning, good-natured colossus.
Google newfie and you’ll be offered Newfie
jokes, Newfie slang, Newfie music, Newfie
songs, Newfie recipes, Newfie sayings and
Newfie dictionary.
Dig a little deeper and you will discover the
Newfie Bullet, a train that ran (sporadically)
between St. John’s and Port aux Basques from
1898 up to the mid-1960s.
The Bullet part of the name was a Newfie
joke in itself for the train was ah, not known
for its speed. Indeed, it was prone to crawl
across the province, frequently stopping for
high winds, lost hunters, steep grades and
jaywalking moose.
Newfie is also used to refer to the
Newfoundland dog, one of the most amiable,
beautiful and altogether magnificent canine
breeds ever to sprinkle a fire hydrant.
And then of course there’s Newfie Screech,
a rum-based libation that can blister paint,
dissolve horseshoes and cause smoke tendrils
to issue from the ears of drinkers.
Legend has it that screech was ‘distilled’
from the scrapings of oaken barrels that had
been used to carry both rum and molasses.
After a few years a particularly potent
encrustation grew on the inside of said barrels.
This crust was boiled out of the barrel with hot
water, cut with a few gallons of grain alcohol
and served to anyone foolish enough to drink
it.
Which is another Newfie joke. I never met a
Newfoundlander who had much time for
screech. Tourists, yes – once, anyway.
Newfie jokes? Well I suppose if you’re thin-
skinned and prone to political correctness you
might find Newfie jokes offensive. But the
best one I ever heard came from the lips of a
waiter in a bar on Duckworth Street
in St. John’s.
He’d been serving a table of ‘come-from-
aways’and eavesdropping on their jokes about
Newfoundland. He came to their table, set
down his beer tray and said:
“Feller from Tarana moved to St. John’s last
year. He was shaving in the bathroom one
morning after he’d been here a couple of
months. Looked in the mirror and saw a brown
ring right across his forehead. He scrubbed at
it with a washcloth but it wouldn’t budge.”
“So he went to the doctor and said ‘What is
it, doc? Do I have a disease?”
The doctor looked at him and said ‘You’re
not from here, are ya?’”
“‘No,’the feller says, I’m from Tarana – how
could you tell?’”
“Doctor says, ‘Ye’ve got nothin’ to worry
about, bye – yer just fulla shit and down a
quart.’”
But that’s not my favourite Newfie joke. My
favourite is a true story. It involves a famous
son of our most rightward province, one Don
Jamieson.
Mister Jamieson, was a cabinet minister in
the Trudeau government back in the 60s and
70s and as such, was called upon from time to
time to campaign through the Newfoundland
outports. During one of those sorties he met a
woman in her 90s who, his handlers informed
Jamieson ‘had never been sick a day in her
life’.
“I find that remarkable, Madame,” said
Jamieson. “Have you never been bedridden?”
The woman laughed merrily. “Oh, Lard, sir,
yiss! T’ousands of times! And twice in a
dory!”
Arthur
Black
Other Views
Newfie. Say it loud, say it proud
Atrip down memory lane can be heart-
warming or it can be heart-breaking.
And while moving is never fun,
sometimes it’s necessary.
This week I was charged with one of the
most difficult moving tasks I have had to
encounter to date: the emptying of my
childhood home.
It’s a battle many people have to encounter
on a daily basis: practicality versus
sentimentality. And while to outsiders my
battle with the basement of my youth may have
looked like an episode of “Hoarders,” it looked
like an episode of “This Is Your Life” to me.
With a one-bedroom apartment, possessions
have to be pared down to the bare essentials.
However, with the impending sale of the house
I grew up in (and my current storage unit), old
baseball trophies, clothes that no longer fit and
public school journals had to face heavy
scrutiny in order to be saved from the large pile
of trash that will be leaving my old house
sometime this week.
I can’t say it wasn’t fun. There was the
painful, but inevitable, realization that I no
longer fit into my Toronto Blue Jays 1992
bullpen jacket, as well as the pictures of me
trying to fit into it that resulted. There were
hundreds of old pictures and even a revisitation
to skateboarding, which claimed my ankle
several years ago.
However, there were also a lot of tough
moments as well.
Without time on our side, it was inevitable
that things would be missed. After years in the
basement Fred Flintstone pillows were soiled,
Garfield clocks were shattered and porcelain
figurines from grandparents were found
cracked or without heads.
The endless stacks of boxes filled with old
copies of Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone
would be pitched and much of my old
schoolwork would find its way into the trash.
Sure it’s possible that halfway down any of
these boxes would be a hidden treasure of my
youth, but without the time to conduct a
thorough evaluation, many things were no
doubt missed and will be missed forever.
But what astounded me was how thorough a
life story that basement presented. From baby
pictures to school pictures, first communion
pictures to confirmation pictures, public school
graduation to college convocation, it was all
down there.
There were pictures from my softball days,
picking up garbage in the outfield and crying
when I had to go to the diamond and
certificates from the City of Pickering, when
my Pickering Pirates were named the team of
the year in 2002 as well as Ontario champions.
The basement was full of shoes and clothes
of all shapes and sizes as I grew out of them
like a hermit crab, constantly moving onto its
new home.
There was also the sad realization that the
house, after over 20 years, would soon not be
ours.
In losing a fridge down the slippery slope of
the stairs, and nearly our lives along with it, the
banister was cracked in half and pulled off of
the wall.
The immediate fear kicked in and I began
wondering what my parents would do when
they found out. That feeling, however, was
quickly replaced with the realization that it no
longer mattered. The banister would soon be
someone else’s problem and that was a sad
realization.
So after this, the past is now truly the past as
relics of old girlfriends, hobbies abandoned
and clothes worn out now sit in black bags,
waiting for their final trip to the landfill.
Nice guy image wins for McGuinty
Moving on out
Experts are racking their brains trying to
explain why Premier Dalton McGuinty
keeps winning by-elections in troubled
times, but failing to take enough into account
many voters find him personally likeable.
This is an image the Liberal premier does
not fully deserve and it should not affect voters
anyway, because they ought to judge
politicians much more on their policies than
personal characteristics.
But the view of McGuinty as a nice guy has
some basis in fact and has served him well,
particularly in the past year, when he has been
under perpetual attacks that mostly have been
justified.
Opposition parties have hammered
particularly at McGuinty’s huge waste in
building a still-incomplete electronic health
records system, neglecting to protect buyers of
lottery tickets from predatory retailers,
allowing many Liberal insiders to gorge from
the public trough and planning but hiding
a big tax increase – and there have been
others.
But McGuinty has continued to win by-
elections including the two most recent. This
can be explained partly by the Progressive
Conservatives under leader Tim Hudak still
finding their feet and hinting too much they
will return to extreme right-wing policies that
have burdened their party recently.
Voters are disinclined even to consider
bringing back the New Democrats after their
brief flirtation with them in government in the
1990s, although they slog away undaunted and
propose some policies most would consider
worthwhile.
But part of the Liberals’ continued
popularity should be attributed to McGuinty’s
personal style, although there has not been a
poll that showed how much it helps them.
McGuinty has been accused daily of being
arrogant, dictatorial, deceitful, out of touch,
secretive, responsible for boondoggles,
arranging sweetheart deals and, most recently
bribing voters, to win by-elections.
The latter also may have substance, because
he kept open a hospital in Toronto scheduled
to close, which helped him win votes and a by-
election there, and has promised to help
mitigate the pension losses of former Nortel
employees in Ottawa, where a by-election will
be held.
While both cases were deserving, it can be
argued the premier’s primary motive was to
collect votes, though is difficult to prove his
motives.
What is unarguable is throughout these and
many other debates among the most bitter in
Ontario politics in years, McGuinty has
remained calm and even-tempered, although at
times shaken, and not responded with equally
bitter counter attacks, which come easy for a
politician.
McGuinty more often has said his
government has more work to do, but is doing
its best in difficult economic times.
A premier who has failed in some duties
should not be praised because he preserves his
equanimity, but it is a welcome change to find
one not snarling back.
McGuinty also offers a refreshing contrast
to Conservative Prime Minister Stephen
Harper, who constantly uses harsh terms to put
down his opponents.
Harper also has shown an “imperial style”
by closing down Parliament when he does not
want it to provide a forum for criticizing his
policies and drastically restricting
opportunities for news media to question him.
Apart from asking TV and radio reporters
not to thrust their cameras and microphones in
his face because it interferes with his thinking,
McGuinty has been reasonably accessible to
media.
McGuinty’s even-tempered style also is
refreshingly different from that of the most-
remembered Conservative premier of recent
times, Mike Harris, who was admired for
some policies, but constantly in fights and
mouthed across the legislature that a respected
Liberal was an “asshole.”
McGuinty even has been pointed to as in
style resembling the earlier, moderate, long-
serving Conservative premier, William Davis,
who often is cited as the model for all
premiers and never got in an unnecessary
argument.
The Conservative opposition leader who
retired last year, John Tory, who worked for
Davis, once conceded McGuinty “handles
things in an unflappable way, like Mr. Davis.”
Being unflappable by no means excuses
McGuinty from all his sins, but it is helping
him with voters when other issues are against
him.
Eric
Dowd
FFrroomm
QQuueeeenn’’ss PPaarrkk
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Loughlin
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