Midgets and matrimony in the land of the maple leaf

'Matrimonial cake'. The classic 4" x 6" OED dictionary slip sitting on the table in the slip-filing room at the OED's offices one day in 1992 was duly catchworded. The slip, however, came not with the customary quotation but rather with a confection: a dessert, made with my very own hands, consisting of two layers of a crumbly sweet oat mixture with a date filling in the middle. Home baking was admittedly a somewhat unorthodox method for getting a Canadianism into the OED, but it was apparently not unappreciated by the OED lexicographers, who perhaps were too busy eating to complain about the lack of a proper citation. Known in most of Canada as 'date squares', this dessert has acquired this matrimonial moniker in Western Canada (where I grew up), for reasons that even the OED has alas been unable to determine. For my efforts were successful, and 'matrimonial cake' is one of the new Canadian entries that have appeared in OED Online. The word is now properly exemplified by quotations, the sources being a 1944 Canadian cookbook unearthed by our Canadian library researcher, Alice Munro's 1971 collection of short stories Lives of Girls and Women, and the Hamilton Spectator newspaper that I found on one of our newspaper CD-ROMs when an OED lexicographer emailed me for a postdating. Just as well, perhaps: just think how that date filling would clog up the Internet. Who knows, however, whether OED subscriptions would skyrocket if we could tell users that consulting the dictionary is literally a piece of cake!

It was very considerate, from a Canadian point of view, for OED lexicographers to start revision in the letter M, thus allowing for the rapid inclusion of maple leaf. Speaking of our national tree, I never thought the sight of a Manitoba maple would give me pleasure, but seeing it in the OED did. Manitoba maples are notoriously weedy trees, shedding what seem like millions of seeds every spring, with the result that I usually have to spend the Canada Day holiday (July 1) unpatriotically ripping maple seedlings out of my garden. But I would never want to see Manitoba maple uprooted from its rightful place in the OED. And being from Manitoba myself, I am heartened that the OED has now recognized my existence (and the existence of a million other Canadians) with an entry for Manitoban, both noun and adjective.

Much of this new Canadian content in the OED is thanks to the massive reading program we at OUP Canada's dictionary department undertook from 1992 onward in order to produce the Canadian Oxford Dictionary in 1998. This reading program, still ongoing, has contributed 125,000 quotations to the OED's quotation files. Sometimes our quotations could be misleading to the innocent lexicographer in Oxford. Take, for example, the quotation from the Goderich Signal-Star (a local newspaper from a small town on the shores of Lake Huron):

'Sue outjumped everyone at the..track and field meet in Tillsonburg last week, winning the gold in the Midget Girls high jump event.'

Do Canadians have a bizarre penchant for making very short people engage in sports more suited for the beanpoles of this world? A check in the quotation file shows that we have midget basketball as well! But no, we are not sadistic: midget in Canadian English designates, as OED Online's new entry correctly states, 'a level of amateur sport typically involving players aged 16 or 17'.

With the letter N approaching, stay tuned for the story on Nanaimo bars, an ultra-rich combination of chocolate, cookie crumbs, coconut, walnuts, and butter cream...