He's Canadian, You Know?

When Canadians ask that question of an American, the American's answer is mostly, “No, I didn’t know that.” Canadians have something like a verbal tic for identifying Canadians who are well-known in the U.S. for one reason or another, but whose Canadianness is not part of that fame. Peter Jennings; Robin McNeill (of PBS’s McNeill-Lehrer News Hour); Malcolm Gladwell of The New Yorker; movie people like Donald Sutherland and Sarah Polly (who directed last year’s Academy Award nominated film with Julie Christie, Away from Her); and the long list of great musicians (ranging from Glenn Gould to K.D. Laing to Oscar Peterson to Joni Mitchell to The Bare Naked Ladies, but especially those singers first located in the 70’s—Neil Young, Gordon Lightfoot, Ian and Sylvia, Leonard Cohen, etc.). Just a few of the people who have come prominently into American lives via Canada. Joni Mitchell has a place up toward the end of the Sunshine Coast. I’ve never run into her (but I rarely ran into anyone famous in L.A., either), but whenever her presence here is mentioned to me, it almost always comes with a “She’s Canadian, you know?”

I doubt anybody anywhere ever says, ‘He’s American, you know?’ Because, if he’s American, you do know. Americans make sure you know. The ‘He’s Canadian’ tag is another way in which Canadians try to get out from under the great behemoth that is U.S. It’s a way of reminding us that Canadians count and they don’t count as Americans; they count as Canadians, even if they are in the U.S.

Here’s a little test. George Lakoff, who is not, as far as I know, Canadian, has been something of a hot property in the U.S. in recent years (especially so considering that he’s an academic whose specialty is linguistics: “He’s a linguist, you know?”). Lakoff has written a trio of books over the past decade that explains to politicians and their fans why Democrats, in particular, lose to Republicans with respect to framing political issues. They’re wonderfully interesting books and I think reasonably accessible to the non-linguist; that is to say, the general, well-educated reader. He first came to public attention , though, in 1980 with a stunning book called Metaphors We Live By (with Mark Johnson) that entirely changed the way I understood language, and especially the use of language in public discourse. He followed that up with a less well-known book called Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, a title which one always remembers as Women, Fire, and OTHER Dangerous Things, which of course is the point of the book: it’s about how we form categories.

I don't know whether taking this test will improve Canadian-American relations, but it might improve understanding the nature of those relations. Here’s the test adapted from Lakoff's book: One way we understand categories is by what is not consistent with the category. Thus, one might ask people to fill in a sentence, as I used to do when I worked in healthcare: He’s (or she’s) a doctor, but __________. If you ask people in the healthcare professions that question, most of them will fill in the blank with something like, He’s a doctor but he spends a lot of time with his family. By contrast, if you ask people from outside of healthcare, they are much more likely to say, He’s a doctor, but he really knows how to talk to patients. What people put in the blank tells you what people think is the opposite of the central characteristic of the category ‘doctor.’ Doctors and nurses categorize doctors as people who don’t have time for their families; patients categorize doctors as people who either don’t know how to talk to patients or don’t care about talking with patients.

Try it yourself; check it out with your friends: He’s Canadian, but …………………. He’s American, but……
I am pretty sure I know how I would fill in those blanks. And the answers are not the same.