A blue-arsed fly

I learned a new expression yesterday: "running around like a blue-arsed fly."

I'd been chatting with the head of my subcommittee, and he was telling me how busy he is these days, due to a promotion he'd received. "I'm running around like a blue-arsed fly," he said, and I burst out laughing at the comical-sounding expression. I promised myself to remember it.

The word "arse" is much more common here than in Ontario. You hear it there, but here it's almost as common as the more familiar "ass." It comes from the UK, of course, as do most of the colloquialisms of the people of Atlantic Canada. I love hearing them. You can be talking along with someone and all of a sudden one of these verbal treasures is in the air and it's like a pleasant surprise. A reminder that I'm in a place not quite like where I came from. It makes me feel both delight and a tiny bit of separateness, because it reminds me that I'm not from here, and that even if I adopted the expression, it would always come to me because I deliberately learned it, and not because it was part of my own culture.

I'm finding that there really is a different culture here. Much more so than in British Columbia, where people were pretty much the same as Ontarians, most of them transplanted from "back east" (Ontario) and smug because they lived in such a beautiful environment that the rest of the country envied. Here, people are much more down-to-earth. They're Atlantic Canadians because they were born here and their families have been here for many, many generations. They really do have salt-water running in their veins. The ocean is as much a part of their existence as the air they breathe.

They have their own distinctive accents here too. Nova Scotians accent is similar to the Newfie accent, but not quite the same. Both round their "i" sounds (roight) and flatten their "a" sounds, not unlike Bostonians. A lot of the times their voices sound a little Irish. Most of the people I deal with regularly in my job are more educated and live in more urban places, so the accents are hardly noticeable a lot of the time. Indeed, some people here have no discernable accent at all. But the "salt of the earth" people (or should they be called salt of the sea people) usually do sound different to the voice I'm used to.

At first I thought the accents would distract me, but I'm getting used to them and only notice them when they're stronger than average. I don't find myself picking it up just yet, probably because, as I said, most of the people I deal with don't really have one. Then again, once or twice yesterday, after spending the day with Scott I thought I noticed a couple of my own words coming out tidewater.