According to the cover copy on Only in Canada, You Say (Oxford), Katherine Barber is “Canada’s Word Lady,” although it does not say who appointed her to that position. As editor-in-chief of the Canadian Dictionary department at Oxford University Press in Toronto she would seem to have the necessary credentials. How to explain, then, the absence of half sack and crockies from this Treasury of Canadian Language? Both can be found in Geist’s Canadian Phrasebook (as documented in our Letters to the Editor and online at geist.com/phrasebook). But then the Geist Phrasebook misses canner (a lobster too small for market and thus destined for the cannery) and steamie (a steamed hot dog, for folks in Quebec). Gitch and gaunch have made their way into both sources (and it is comforting to know that our national undergarments have been documented so thoroughly). These variations between two parallel efforts to track the peculiarities of Canadianese only confirm that language—Canadian or otherwise—is an amorphous beast that is not easily pinned down. Only in Canada, You Say makes a more than decent attempt, offering seventeen different words for ice (including frazil and slob), and a six-page appendix that gives official terms for residents of many Canadian locales (Haweaters live on Manitoulin Island; residents of Prince Rupert apparently go by Rupertites). All in all, it’s jeezly skookum.