Bonus. In this bonus episode, we look at why Canada has been without a current homegrown dictionary for twenty years and how John Chew is leading the charge to fix it. We look at how John got the job and the unique challenges of funding a dictionary in a bilingual country. John also shares how his aphantasia—the inability to visualize imagery—actually makes him a better data organizer for the complex world of lexicography.
Bonus. In this bonus episode, we look at why Canada has been without a current homegrown dictionary for twenty years and how John Chew is leading the charge to fix it. We look at how John got the job and the unique challenges of funding a dictionary in a bilingual country. John also shares how his aphantasia—the inability to visualize imagery—actually makes him a better data organizer for the complex world of lexicography.
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: This ad-free podcast is part of your Grammarpalooza subscription. Greetings Grammarpaloozians, I am here with John Chew. We just talked for almost an hour about Scrabble, which is, you know, a fun, amazing game. And so look for that in your main feed. But now John has this whole other life where he is involved in the new Canadian English Dictionary. So we're going to talk about that. John Chew, welcome back to the Grammar Girl podcast.
John Chew: Thank you for having me back again.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, when I read that you were doing this new dictionary, I couldn't help but think of all the people I know who work at dictionaries who have been laid off, like the dictionary world is shrinking. But you are involved in this project for a new dictionary, which is so exciting. Like, how did this come about?
John Chew: Well, it's actually connected to my previous life, in our previous conversation. As he editor of the NASPA, North American Scrabble Players Association Word List, I'm constantly on the lookout for new sources for words to add to our tournament word list. And we've relied heavily on the Merriam-Webster online word list and their collegiate dictionary, but we also use Webster's New World, Oxford College, Canadian Oxford, Funk and Wagnalls, and so on. And I heard, I read, a few years ago that the Editors Association of Canada, of which my wife is a member, was looking for someone to edit, to take charge of a project to create a new Canadian English dictionary. And I thought, that sounds like something I should have heard about maybe 10 years ago when I had time and energy. And you know, it's interesting that they're looking for this, but I really don't want to go anywhere near the project because I've got way more than I can handle on my plate. And so I thought, I want to be part of this team. I'm sure these will be interesting people to hang out with. If I'm part of the team, then they'll give me early access to all of the cool Canadian words that I can then sneak into the North American word list. And so I figured out this fiendishly clever plan.
I decided to go into it, into this job interview for this position as unprepared as I possibly could. I sent them a PDF export of my LinkedIn page, no cover letters. Like, "Here, this is me. I'd like to be part of your team." And I had the horrifying experience at the beginning of the meeting of them saying, "We think you're the guy. We really like your resume. Will you please tell us how you're going to save Canadian, single-handedly save Canadian lexicography?" I thought, I'm in deep trouble now. And so, that was how I got started. What they liked about me-not to toot my own horn too much-was I have a background in classics. That is to say, I studied ancient Greek for eight years and Latin for five years. And I speak a few languages, not as many as my late polyglot father did, but, you know, not his 40. But I've got a handful. I'm obsessive about dictionaries. I've read lots of dictionaries. And, I also have an obsession with database-driven typography. So I like building databases full of information and then finding interesting ways to visually represent them in type. And this actually goes back to another potential- not that I'm asking you to come to talk to me all the time- but I discovered since our last conversation 10 years ago that I've got a neurological condition called aphantasia, which prevents me from visual, from, any sort of recreation of sensory inputs in the form of associated with memories. So, if I close my eyes and try to imagine what the room looks like, I see the inside of my eyelids. I don't see the room; I can't visualize it.
Mignon Fogarty: I had another guest who had that, a fiction writer, who told me about that as well. Like she cannot picture an apple.
John Chew: You will have to tell me afterwards who that was.
Mignon Fogarty: I will.
John Chew: Because one of my best friends, in fact, a fiction writer, who turns out has the same problem and who is well known for the quality of her descriptive prose, because that's her workaround to-I don't like to say affliction, because it's part of my identity-but it's her coping mechanism for not being able to remember things.
The way other people do is to write little poems and snatches of evocative prose, which she uses.
Mignon Fogarty: It was Jennifer Lynn Barnes. She told me about it, so it's not private.
John Chew: Okay. Okay. So, I'm actually, I'll tell you the name of my friend later on when we come to book recommendations.
Mignon Fogarty: Okay.
John Chew: So my coping mechanism is clearly to mathematize everything and turn everything into data. So I have tables of information in my head. But I like organizing data. Really? I live for organizing data. And when they said, "Would you please make this happen?" I thought, okay, I will tell you. And so off the, I knew what had happened to the Canadian lexicographical industry, that the dictionary industry. What happened was we didn't have dictionaries up in Canada because we're just a bunch of uncultured people. People, or thought we were up until the 1960s, the first publication of a dictionary in Canada. Up until then, we were entirely dependent on our joint colonial masters, the Americans and the British. And it was only through the efforts of an American linguist who was tired of seeing Canadian words being misattributed as being American, as they were being edited into the Dictionary of Americanisms on historical principles, that he came up to Canada and said, "Hey, you guys, why don't you have your own dictionaries up here?" And they said, "What's this guy talking about, eh?" So they said, "Well, do you know about dictionaries? Would you like to show us how to make a dictionary?" And he said, "Well, sure." And so, his timing was good because we have our own centennials and bicentennials up here. And Canada was founded in 1867, or confederated in 1867, so we had a huge celebration in 1967 for our centennial year. The federal government went around doing anything they could to make us feel patriotic and nationalistic in a very un-Canadian way. And one of the things that they did was they completely funded the creation of the first Canadian dictionary, which was great.
And everybody said, "Yay, we finally know what Canadian English is." After a while, in the next few decades, various American and British publishers came into the Canadian publishing market and said, "We've got this dictionary that's almost Canadian, except it's American or it's British. Can we just change the cover on it and maybe sprinkle some maple syrup on it and republish it as a Canadian dictionary?" And their distributors said, "Sure. If it says Canadian on it, Canadians will buy it." So it happened for, you know, the 1980s and nineties, especially until 1998. Oxford University Press got in on the deal; it must have been early in the 1990s that they started planning it. But they basically said, “Okay, if you guys don't know what you're doing, you're letting people walk all over your language, saying things are Canadian when they're not, really Canadian, publishing dictionaries without doing the research. We will show you guys what a real dictionary is like,” and they came out with the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, which is basically, when it came out, it instantly became the equivalent of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary in the States, it was the dictionary. Anybody who was editing something had to be according to the standards of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary. And so that was in 1998.
And then four years later, they came out with the second edition and we thought, oh, this is great. You know, they'll come out with a new edition every four years; we're set for life and so on. Then, a few years later, Oxford said, “We changed our minds. We realized there isn't actually a large enough market in Canada to support the staff we need to maintain this product to our standards.” Which is fair. I mean, lexicography is a hugely human, labor-intensive project because, as anybody who's ever sat next to a lexicographer at a party, as I'm sure all of us have, knows there's a lot of thought that goes into dictionaries. At every stage of it, there's just people thinking and talking and writing and documenting and editing and more editing and so on. And, you know, Oxford University Press had set up a whole Canadian operation to do this, and they hired a lot of people, yet they really couldn't justify continuing this on an ongoing basis. So they just said, you know, peace out, we're out of here. We can't do this anymore.
And the problem was that they'd driven all the other dictionary publishers out of business because, as soon as Oxford had come out with theirs, everybody realized, oh, that's so much better than what we had; we're not going to do ours anymore. And so, we suddenly went from having a bunch of okay dictionaries and one great one to having one great one that was increasingly out of date. And when it reached about the 10-year point, the Editor's Association of Canada, which really professionally relies on this sort of document, started to be very concerned. And, they started reaching out to all of the publishers in Canada, asking them to reconsider and saying, would you please, you know, what would it take for you to edit the dictionary again? And all of them said, "There is no business case for this. We can't do it." Then they turned to academics and said, "Could you take this on as an academic project? And could you please create a dictionary of Canadian English as a research project?" This too actually turned out to be unsuccessful. Not that there isn't grant money available for scientific research in Canada, but for the oddly Canadian political reason that it's a political non-starter in Canada to do anything for English speakers that isn't done to an equal extent for French speakers because we are a bilingual country.
Mignon Fogarty: Of course.
John Chew: If we went hat in hand to the government and said, "We would like $5 million to make a dictionary," they'll say, "Is it a bilingual dictionary?" No. Are we, is there a corresponding French dictionary that we can give $5 million to?" They would say, "Well, no, because the Quebec government already funds its own dictionaries; they don't need federal money for that." The conversation would usually end there or would always end there.
So going back to the job interview that I was trying to flunk out of and failing miserably at flunking, the proposal that I had for them was, I said, "Look, I know that you can't do this on a commercial basis, and I know that you can't do it with grant funding. But I've had some experience with funding word list production on the Scrabble side, exactly how much it takes to make these things, and I know much their intrinsic value is to people and to publishers and to licensees. And I think we can make this work through a hybrid approach. I think we can get some grant funding. I think we can get some subscription funding. We can, if necessary, run ads on a freemium type, ad revenue from our websites. But I know also that once we get this off the ground, there will be a huge demand for this from big tech companies who are forever being criticized in Canada for not having a Canadian option when it comes to spell checking.”
Like we all, everybody around the world, you know, on their computers or on their phones, they rely on not needing to remember how to type or spell or compose sentences anymore. Imagine being in that situation in a country where the big tech companies don't have a dictionary that represents your language, right? So what do you do? We were, I mean, until about 10 years ago, our only choices up here were to be American or choose to be British, and then manually make corrections that would then end up being automatically redlined. And more recently we can, you can choose Canadian English in Apple's menu or Microsoft's menu, but the quality of what you get, it's not good. It's sort of random and haphazard because they've done the best that they can, but since the Canadian Oxford Dictionary stopped being published, there hasn't really been anything to fill in the void that was left by them. Language has changed a lot in those 20 years. It's there, there are new words that come, that are invented and coined every year. Words are used differently. Words are spelled differently. Words that started off as being open compounds, like phrases with spaces in them, have become hyphenated or closed compounds, single words, words add new meanings added to them. To take a very Canadian example, last week we announced the winner of the Canadian Word of the Year contest or selection process.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
John Chew: We're a dictionary, and we need to do that. The runner-up was "elbows up," which is a hockey phrase. It was popularized by our Prime Minister as a way of, as a patriotic rally. You know, defensive, be offensive and defensive and get into your opponent's necks with your Canadianness. But the winner was "maple wash" or "maple washing," which is maybe less familiar outside of Canada, but it refers to the practice of labeling something as being Canadian. And that's a tactic that's been adopted by unscrupulous retailers here who, when they see people boycotting things that are not Canadian but from another country that I won't name to avoid giving offense, they'll put a big maple leaf sticker on it or, over the "made in whatever" label, they'll put a "made for Canada" label on it, which is not technically incorrect, but you know, it's maple washing.
So that word, "maple washing," which has been around for about five years, has changed a lot in meaning even in those five years and has gone from being a hyphenated compound to being a closed compound. Five years ago, it referred more to the practice of the very un-Canadian practice of saying how great Canada is and talking about things like maple washing things like Canada's shameful colonial history or history of slavery or whatever. Just by saying Canada was better than some other countries in this respect, therefore we should be proud of it when we really should be examining those aspects of our history.
Anyway, so to go back to this, here's an example of a word that didn't exist five years ago that has changed its meaning at least twice during that time and its spelling "style." So not, would be surprising if the big tech companies did adopt this because they don't have someone watching Canadian words like we do. And so I said when we do come up with a list, a good solid dictionary project will be worth a lot of money, and we can actually sustain the project just on licensing revenues to tech companies if they haven't all been taken over by artificial intelligences by then. But that's a different story. So I said licensing revenues, subscription fees, ad revenues, grant funding, and then dictionary sale, like actually sales of printed products together, we can make a budget out of this. We actually have produced a budget out of this to show bona fide when we apply for grants and so on, and we've been successful.
And then they said, well, you know, who's going to actually do this if we're not going to be asking an individual publisher to do it? I said, well, you know, we can take the same sort of hybrid, multi-sectoral approach to it. We've already got of people in the Editors Association who are willing to volunteer their time until they can be paid to do it. We’ve got people in academia who are willing to volunteer their time as they can write papers about the process. We have publishers who are probably sitting on old dictionary content that they might be willing to license and monetize to us in some form just to get some monetary value out of ancient, otherwise unusable content. And I would not underestimate just the willingness of the general Canadian public to volunteer. So they said, "Yeah, okay, that sounds like it might work." And, so I signed on for it, and I'll say as far as the money coming from and how are we doing a dictionary in this economy, say that the terms that I signed on for were that I would get paid when there would be money, and there hasn't really been enough money to pay me yet. But that's the, I keep thinking, any day now.
The reason that I think that the reason that I'm more optimistic about it than I have been at any time in the past couple of years is that we've just finished editing the initial fascicle, which consists of all of the letters or all of the entries that start with the letter Q. I'll go back to that in a moment, if I remember. When I say finished, I mean our editors are trying to tear it out of my clutches so they can start reviewing it, editing it, revising it, and I'm still at the stage where I want to keep rereading it and seeing if I can tweak it to make it just a little bit better before someone else sees it.
And when I say someone else, I mean someone outside of our core group of definers and pronouncers and so on, before someone that I don't know actually sees it. So as long as they can get that turned around soon, I'm pretty confident that we can get a, and we weren't initially thinking about doing a print edition until we had more substantial content available, but I think there's been enough interest in it that I think we should do, we should start printing it on demand, fascicle by fascicle. So I'm planning on doing a Q fascicle sometime in the first quarter of next year. And that should stimulate a lot more interest. So going back to why we did Q.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
John Chew: There's a question when you edit it, when you start working on a dictionary from scratch. Well, the first question that you should ask yourself if you're editing a dictionary, a brand new dictionary, not based on any other dictionary, the very first question you should ask yourself is, why am I doing this? You should really question your life choices very carefully at this point, because it's going to be a lot of work, and nobody should ever do this.
However, once you've gotten over that hurdle, the next question is: well, where do I start? I mean, there are a couple of hundred thousand words or lexemes in the English language. It’s a lot of them. Do I do them thematically? Like, do I define all the animals first? Do I define all the verbs first? Do I define all the words starting with a particular letter? We went with letters just because we do check our various competitors, various other sources to see what words they have to make sure we haven't missed any. And it's a lot easier to ask, you know, Merriam-Webster or the Government of Canada's Permium database or whatever, what words they have starting with the letter Q than what are the names of all the animals you can think of. So we decided to go alphabetically, and then the question was, which letter do we start with?
The problem with starting with the letter A is that you're going to make mistakes when you start editing a dictionary. Even though we've spent more time on the letter Q-substantially more time on the letter Q, processes and documenting processes and methodologies rather than actually doing the work, because that's going to pay off down the road when we'll be able to go five or ten times faster now that we've got everything streamlined and so on, we're still going to end up with mistakes. Anytime you write anything, there'll be a mistake no matter how many times it's edited. And the easiest way, of course, to find a mistake in a book is to let it randomly fall open to the page that has a mistake on it.
Mignon Fogarty: I was going to say, to find, to publish it, to put it in print, that can't be changed.
John Chew: Print it.
Mignon Fogarty: Then you'll find the errors all over.
John Chew: But dictionary readers often start at the letter A, and you want to make sure that the letter A is nice and clean because they often make purchasing decisions based on the first few pages that they look at. And if they see the letter A has mistakes in it, they'll think, you know, what is this dictionary? So then we thought, well, maybe the letter M that's nice and hidden in the middle of the dictionary. Nobody would start with the letter M. Then we thought, I know, as a Scrabble player, there are a lot of words that start with the letter M. And I want to actually have a letter that's short enough that we can get our volunteers to feel a sense of accomplishment, to get that long overdue dopamine rush after a couple of years of working on one letter to know that they've actually accomplished something. So it has to be a short letter, and that means it's got to be something like J, Q, X, Zed, and of the other ones of those have problems like Zed. It's just there are way too many zoo words and too many Greek words in general. And it's a really weird letter. X, likewise, has lots of Greek words because we don't tend to start words with X in English. And it's also too short. You won't come across all the problems that you're likely to with a dictionary. Starting with, if you look at the word, the letter X.
J I thought about especially, because my first name is John. I thought it has a lot more going for it. It's worth two more points. And J is in Scrabble. It's the most sort of controversial letter in Scrabble because it used to be the hardest one to, well, it still is the hardest one to play. But in terms of lexicographical content, there's some words like “queen” and “queer” that have changed a lot since 2002. And people can't rely on definitions from dictionaries from back then to understand the nuances of these words or when and how they should be used. And also, specifically in Canada, going back to the word “queen,” with the death of Queen Elizabeth, a lot of our government terms had to change. So people talking about the Queen's English or the King's English? Well, we choose one or the other, depending on who's in power here. when we'd. You've got your government printing office in the United States. That's called the Queen's printer or the King's printer, or actually often answered, which is a separate issue. But there are Queen's highways where you guys have interstates. There are, you know, Queen's counsels, which are an elevated form of lawyer. There are at least 20 different entries that start with queen, all of which were obsoleted by the death of Queen Elizabeth, and all of which now have to be replaced with at least definitions that say “During the reign of a queen, you know, see kings, whatever.”
Another reason for looking at the letter Q is that there's a huge indigeneity component to the letter Q. And when we talk about indigeneity, we use language slightly differently. It's one of the differences between Canadian and American English, is that American Indians prefer to be identified as American Indians, whereas calling First Nations people, as we call them here in Canada, "Indians" is considered offensive. So then there's also the question of aboriginal versus indigenous and what to do with the people that we call Métis, or whether or not people, the Inuit people of the far north of what category they fall into. Anyway, by indigenous, I mean what Americans might think of as American Indian people. So there's an indigenous contribution to the Q section that's overrepresented. Those include words like my preferred spelling for the word “kayak,” which is the Q-A-J-A-Q spelling that requires a blank to play in Scrabble, which is more orthographically accurate and respectful from the point of view of the Inuit language and which comes with its own usage note in our dictionary now.
That if you're talking about something that's made according to traditional means by traditional Inuit kayak builders, then it's more respectful to spell it Q-A-J-A-Q, even if there's a little bit of friction there with understanding on the part of your reader. On the other hand, if you're talking about, say, an American sticks an outboard motor on the back of his kayak and still calls it that, and if it's made of plastic, then maybe you call that kayak with a K just to distinguish the two. So there's a usage difference there. And then there are words like words like, Quincy, which is a type of igloo, but dugout instead.
And then there's also a bunch of words from our large immigrant communities, especially of Arabic origin, like Kibla, a device that tells you which way it, which way Mecca is, and so on. I live in a city, Toronto, where over half of the population was born outside of Canada, let alone Toronto. So we take the contribution that so called “World English” has made to Canadian English very seriously. And of the distribution, you know, because people come to Canada from not everywhere in the world, the populations that bring more people here are overrepresented in our language. And so for instance, with Q, there's also the best Scrabble word, best of the Scrabble words, QI, which is the only reason that the Q is at all playable in modern Scrabble, pronounced chi, meaning the life force.
Mignon Fogarty: So is the Q fascicle going to be ready in 2026 or 2027?
John Chew: 2026.
Mignon Fogarty: Soon. Very soon.
John Chew: Yeah. Soon. Yeah.
Mignon Fogarty: That's exciting.
John Chew: It is very exciting.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Let me know when that happens.
John Chew: I'm hoping that it will result in a substantial uptick in interest and funding, and it will let us then speed run through the rest of the dictionary. And then, you know, three years from now, we can maybe be sitting with a completed dictionary and a reference for our own language.
Mignon Fogarty: Well, when you were talking about funding, I have become aware that you recently chided the Prime Minister of Canada about language usage, and I was thinking that might not be very good for their funding. So what's that all about?
John Chew: I’m not sure if that was a good idea or a bad idea? I'm still waiting to hear back from him about that. But yeah, the Editor's Association recently noticed that he was using hyper-British spellings in all of his publications, and he'd told all of his staff to use them. And I, you know, we're a little bit sensitive on the subject of people who exercise too much authoritarian power up here. And the very idea that someone could demand their staff spell words differently. Our Prime Minister published a budget document where all, well, 80% of the words that end in -ization, like digitalization, were spelled with an S, and only 20% of them were spelled the way we're used to seeing them with a zed, or the way that you'd be used to seeing them with a Z. And we're pretty sure that it's as a result of his direct influence. It goes back to the fact that our Prime Minister is 60 years old. He's about the same age as I am. When I was growing up, I was told Canadian means you can choose to be British or American when you spell words. Can you imagine an American being told they can be, their choice is to be one of two other different foreign countries?
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
John Chew: That's hard to wrap your head around. And yet that what, we were grown up being told that our country didn't merit its own spelling system, but hooray, you get to choose between two others. And so it was a huge deal when we came up with our own Canadian English dictionaries, and I think our Canadian Prime Minister is hearkening back to the days of his childhood and thinking, "Oh, okay. I was told I could do the British spelling or the American spelling, and if I don't want to appear to be too American, I should use the British one." But that's just so wrong for so many reasons.
First of all, it's not even the idea that ISE is a British spelling is a little bit of cultural fossilization. The way things used to be in Britain is not really universal in Britain anymore. Like the Oxford English Dictionary, they recommend IZE, and they have for quite a while, and they look at the ISE spelling as being a French mistake. If you look at their entry for those suffixes, they say, "Well, you know, etymologically speaking, the Zed comes from the Greek letter Zeta, and so we should be representing it in English as the letter-" I'm paraphrasing- "as the letter Zed.” It's only because these words came through French, and the French didn't know how to spell things that we spell it with an S at all. And we English don't need to perpetuate that mistake, certainly not at Oxford. And I apologize for any offense I may just to have caused my colleagues at Oxford.
So yeah, so we wrote this letter to the Canadian Prime Minister, and we haven't heard back yet, but it's attracted a lot of attention. I've spent all day talking to the New York Times and the BBC and so on, and trying to I mean, trying to put forward a reasonably lighthearted spin on things. But you know, it's important as far as the Editors' Association is concerned. I don't think they would really mind if the Prime Minister came out and said, "Okay, everybody, let's use ISE spellings now." And if someone then published a dictionary that said this, but it's the situation where you have an 80-20 split in the same document with words being spelled two different ways, that bothers even non-editors. And so they would like consistency, and they would like decisions like this to be made in a planned and organized way with appropriate consultation and not unilaterally.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, dictionaries have always been patriotic or nationalistic documents. I think a lot of people don't realize that, but once you dig into the history, you learn that a lot. Like everyone feels like they need a national language, like they need their own language. And so Canada deserves that too, you know?
John Chew: There was a sociolinguist who famously said that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. But I would say a language is a dialect with a dictionary.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, I like that.
John Chew: You don't need a navy anymore.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, I used the Army and Navy quote in one of my books as the little quote at the beginning.
John Chew: Yeah.
Mignon Fogarty: To finish up, let’s get to your book recommendations because I love hearing from my guests, you know, what your favorite books are. What would you recommend for the people you love to read?
John Chew: The first book is a book that I really wish had been published 10 years earlier because I would've just slept with it under my pillow when I was a budding young math geek in high school. And a book, it's a beautifully written book called-this is going to make people think, why am I tuned into this podcast?-but it's called “Concrete Mathematics,” and it's a pun on the word of, on a phrase, “discrete mathematics.” It's basically how to count things, but at a very sophisticated level. It's a branch of mathematics that I really find compelling called compinatorics. What I like about it is that it is accessible, like the whole branch of mathematics is accessible to anybody who doesn't know anything about mathematics. It's really how do you count things? How do you count things effectively? How do you count the number of, how do you count the number of squares on a chessboard? How do you count the number of ways of arranging the pieces on a chessboard? That sort of thing. And this particular book, “Concrete Mathematics” by Graham Knuth and Potashnik, computer scientists will recognize Knuth as being a famous, the most famous name in computer science of Donald Knuth is, yes, it's that Knuth. It's a book that's usually presented as a textbook for college age computer science students, but it's really an excellent exposition of compinatorics to anybody who has any sort of casual interest in recreational math or who has a bright kid who is in middle school or high school and would like to be challenged to learn how professional mathematicians think about mathematics. So that's “Concrete Mathematics”; that's one.
Mignon Fogarty: Wonderful.
John Chew: The second book is more of professional, current, professional interest to me, and it's a book called “Creating Canadian English,” by a friend and recent collaborator on the Canadian English dictionary with me. His name is Stefan Dollinger. He's a professor of the University of British Columbia. And it's not a long read, but it's a very intense academic study. Well, "academic" makes it sound dry. It's not dry because he’s got a really entertaining writing style about the history of Canadian English. What is Canadian English? How do people, how do different people look at what Canadian English is, what types of Canadians A whole bunch of really entertaining anecdotes about the shenanigans that people got up to when editing dictionaries in the mid-20th century and in the early 20th century. It's called “Creating Canadian English,” and it's a must-read for anybody who has even a passing interest in Canadian English. Okay, that narrows the field down.
Mignon Fogarty: That sounds fascinating to me.
John Chew: The last book, I'm going to admit I haven't actually read the book, but it was a book written by one of my best friends. There's a word that is sadly lacking from the English language, from the common English language. It will be in the Canadian English dictionary because I'm going to put my thumb on the scale to that extent. It's a word that exists in many languages; the one that's most familiar to your listeners is probably Spanish. It's the word “compadre,” which comes into English as “compadre,” and it means, in Spanish it means, someone that you're close to because you share a godparent-child relationship with them. So, you've decided that these people are important enough to you that you treat their children like yours, and they treat your children like theirs and so on.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh.
John Chew: And the kids grew up as cousins. And there isn't-we have this idea of godparent-godchild, which is not widespread anymore in North America, but the idea of the bond between the parents that expresses this confidence in them is something that's important in many cultures, but not really in North America, not really in Anglophone cultures. It's something that's sadly missing.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
John Chew: Anyway, there's a book that's written by my compadre, my-the mother of my godson. Her name is Michelle Sagara, S-A-G-A-R-A. She is a moderately successful fantasy writer. She writes stories in a fantasy realm. She's been writing them under that name and under her married name, Michelle West for decades now, the entire time that I've known her, she's also a fan. The person that I mentioned earlier has aphantasia and writes beautiful prose as a coping mechanism for not being able to actually visualize anything. The book that I would recommend-I'm sorry that I haven't read these, but it's just not my cup of tea. I like hard science fiction because there's more data in it. And she just writes things about people and emotions and it's all just sort of too rich for me in that sense.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh no, people.
John Chew: But she's, one of her popular series is called “The Chronicles of Elantra.” The first book is called “Cast in Shadow.” I had a friend-actually, I had my wife describe it to me because she's a huge fan and she had, I say I own the book. I own the book because it's on my wife's bookshelf. And what communal community property. It is a police procedural set in a fantasy city ruled by a dragon. The reason that I'm naming this book as my third choice is not just because I have this excellent friend, but she's going through a really hard time right now. She has a 27-year-old son who suffered a catastrophic hemorrhagic stroke, beginning of November and has been unable to write at all since then. Thanks to Canadian healthcare, she's not out any money for hospital expenses, so we're not doing a GoFundMe or anything like that. She's been spending every day at her son's bedside, just keeping him company, and he's doing better now. He's able to stand for the first time in six weeks on his own two legs yesterday for the first time. I go in and I spend a couple of hours with her just so she can go to the bathroom and so on. But she's been unable to write at all, as you could imagine. And for someone who's a professional writer, if you don't write, that means you don't get any income unless people buy your existing books.
So if you like this story but you don't like fantasy novels, just please consider buying a copy of “Cast in Shadow.” And if you do like fantasy novels, then buy the whole series.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Sometimes the choices we make matter for different reasons. So that's called “Cast in Shadow.”
John Chew: “Cast in Shadow.”
Mignon Fogarty: And the author's name is?
John Chew: Michelle Sagara, M-I-C-H-E-L-L-E, S-A-G-A-R-A.
Mignon Fogarty: Sounds like a great reason to give a book a try. I love that.
John Chew: I love that.
Mignon Fogarty: Well, John Chew, thank you so much for being here with us today. I really, I'm just, you do fascinating work and I love talking with you.
John Chew: It's always a delight to talk to you too.