Comment by nucleardog
2 days ago
Surprising one for me was "all dressed" as a term for, e.g., a pizza with all the toppings.
Apparently it's a direct translation from French and is pretty exclusive to Quebec English and the Easternmost part of Ontario (which is heavily French).
And Saskatchewan. Which the site notes is "a bit of a mystery".
Also found "parkade" interesting--apparently it's still much more heavily used in Western Canada, and they attribute that to it having been "seeded" by some Hudson's Bay advertisements run at their original 6 locations all in Western Canada.
Some other words/terms that surprised me: renoviction, gong show, kerfuffle, off-sale, stagette
I (West Coast) pretty much entirely associate "all-dressed" with potato chips.
As a West Coaster, I had to look up nearly every term in this article. As usual, "Canadian" almost entirely means the central/east areas.
It's just like "aboot" and milk in bags.
Dressed all over, zesty mordant, and gelapenno.
The goalie trinity right there
I (US) also associate "all-dressed" with potato chips since we started getting them down here.
The Works is usually a the name for the pizza. Chiming in for the east coast, all dressed is chips.
Having spent a large portion of time answering phones in the pizza business, I can assure you that a great many people in Saskatchewan will order an all-dressed pizza even though we had no such thing on the menu.
Yeah, mostly came as a surprise to me because I've spent most of my time in Saskatchewan and Ontario near the Quebec border. I somehow managed to spend my entire life bouncing around Canada and never spend much time anywhere where "all dressed pizza" didn't exist, even though it's apparently a highly-specific term.
The Works is pretty common in the US, too. Pizza and sandwich toppings
in MB, never heard of all-dressed pizza in my life. We have the chips and the works pizza
And bagels.
It was an Everything pizza at the place I worked at as a kid. They're disgusting.
Old, but good, CBC documentary on this type of thing:
https://youtu.be/eIoTpkM5N64?si=FnGploZrLZ1XRVXO&utm_source=...
Kerfuffle is British - quite common here. 19th century Scots apparently!
> And Saskatchewan. Which the site notes is "a bit of a mystery".
There's no mystery. This is rubbish research. In parts of Manitoba we also use all-dressed for the same purpose (and of course chips). The unifying factor is French culture. The Riel Rebellion helped bring tremendous franocphones, and French culture out west. There are areas like St. Boniface in Winnipeg where s some people speak only French. The Metis are in both Manitoba and Quebec...
It's been a long time now, but from what I remember from school, a critical part of the notability of Gabrielle Roy[1] was that she wrote from the perspective of francophones living in the prairies.
I appreciate the DHCP-3 is not a monolithic work, but to have both authorship and editorial oversight of a corpus that presents itself as a rigorous treatise of Canadianisms demonstrate either broad ignorance of, or reckless disregard for a significant portion of our heritage is just baffling to me. What's the point if one is not going to be ruthlessly thorough?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabrielle_Roy
A lot of French history has been erased from the Canadian West
Manitoba was founded by French speakers (the Metis) and about 2000 Metis were supposed to get most of what is now downtown Winnipeg. Their culture was eventually suppressed by Ontario.
> Surprising one for me was "all dressed" as a term for, e.g., a pizza with all the toppings.
What on Earth. Wikipedia tells me:
> An all-dressed chip called The Whole Shabang is produced by American prison supplier Keefe Group. It became available to the general public in 2016.[4] Frito-Lay began selling all-dressed Ruffles potato chips in the United States that same year.[5]
I had assumed the entire time that everyone uses this term for potato chips (and that everyone has the flavour) and that the Quebecois were just being weird by also applying it to pizza.
--
"Renoviction" is a very recent neologism that's mainly used in the specific major cities where it's an issue (because of the housing market).
"Gong show" I think is relatively old-fashioned (as in Gen X) by comparison. I'm actually surprised Americans don't say that, given that the actual show was on NBC.
I can easily find "kerfuffle" in supposedly American online dictionaries so I think their claim is rather dubious. On the flip side, I've never in my life heard "off-sale"; and in Ontario it's only quite recently (https://www.ontario.ca/document/alcohol-master-framework-agr... https://news.ontario.ca/en/release/1003988/ontario-consumers...) that you can even legally purchase beer and wine at a grocery store.
In Vancouver in the 1990s, if you wanted to buy a six-pack of beer at 10pm after the government-run liquor store closed, you would walk into a local pub and ask the bartender if they did "off-sales". If yes, they would sell you a cold six-pack for a very small markup.
Also, in Ontario in the 1990s, one-eighth of an ounce of weed was called a "half-quarter", ha ha.
> Renoviction
That's very common word these days at least here in PEI. Kicking people out to "renovate".
It basically means renovate as in sweep the floor and paint a small patch on the wall, done. All so they can kick out the tenant and up the rent 1,000%.
It's interesting because it's a term that emerged due to a legal allowance (renovation+eviction: allowance to evict a tenant when major renovations to a building have to be done).
What other legal-derived portmanteaus are there?
There's something human and clever and beautiful in the smart portmanteau in that it just communicates an idea so well.
I've never in my life heard "off-sale" . . .
Off-sale has long been used in Alberta. I have a memory of asking my parents what it meant when I was a kid (and I am in my 40s, now).
"off-sale" at a licensed premises means sale for off-premise consumption.
In BC.
Maybe from UK ‘off-license’?
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In Quebec French we use “toute garnie” to refer to a pizza with red sauce, mozzarella, mushrooms, green peppers and pepperonis.
Which is funny because that translates to "fully garnished" not "all dressed". Tabarnac
IMO that's a mistranslation; “stuffed with everything” would be more accurate.
Here in Ontario English we call that pizza deluxe!
Depends where in Ontario!
I'm in Ontario but in a heavily French area (i.e., East of Ottawa) and "toute garni / all dressed" is common. You'll find it places like Ottawa as well given the proximity to Quebec and French population.
That is what OP said. "All dressed" is a direct translation from French.
Yes, they both refer to the same pizza. Many francophones actually say "une pizza all dress" - it refers to that specific combination of toppings though, not literally every available topping.
Do you call “tomato sauce” “red sauce”?
I can't speak authoritatively for the OP, but yes, I would expect red sauce to be tomato-based. Compare with "sauce brune" [brown sauce ~= gravy] which is what gets put on poutine.
"Can confirm".
In the mid 70s, I would order a small pizza, all dressed from McGill Pizza, when feeling peckish. $1.10, delivered to your door in no time at all.
There's a significant (though not exactly large) french-speaking population in Saskatchewan.
I live a couple blocks from a large french-only school.
A “fully dressed” poboy in New Orleans is one with all the fixing’s
Huh, that makes sense given "all dressed" came from French and New Orleans' French history.
I'm not sure why we both ended up with "dressed" given the French is literally "all garnishes / toppings" or "wholly garnished / topped". I'm sure some linguist could probably do a dissertation on this or something. And hopefully also cover how Saskatchewan ended up with using "all dressed" because I'm really curious about that outlier.
> I'm not sure why we both ended up with "dressed" given the French is literally "all garnishes / toppings" or "wholly garnished / topped".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dress
> 4. (also figuratively) To adorn or ornament (something). [from 15th c.]
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/garnish
> 1. To decorate with ornaments; to adorn; to embellish.
(Bonus: "garnish" is etymologically related to "warn". There are many such other pairs in English, e.g. "guarantee" / "warranty" and "guard" / "ward". (As I understand it: the Gauls could pronounce the "g", but the Franks couldn't.)
There are several parking structures called "parkades" in Salem Oregon.