You might be a Canadian if.....

[eyespy]

Ah, so when a Canuck takes his mickey out it's socially acceptable!

Now what's a poutine? I've used serviettes on a davenport, but know that's the same thing as a Chesterfield. No clue about the poutines though.

[Zoe]

its fries, gravy and cheese. real fattening and real good!

Zoe

[damzookeeper]

Zoe, but not just any cheese... curds from St. Alberts cheese factory are the best in poutine!!! lol and I live less than an hour away from all that cheese.
Oh, and poutine is a french word but we english use it too, just so eyespey realizes it isn't pronounced like it is spelled although I had a friend or too with real english accents that pronounced it Poo-tin. lol
and I'm sure a lot more was forgotten on that list. But here's one....
We fix our shingles on our roof, not our ruff.

[eyespy]

What do British people mean when they say "mickey"? The new Harry Potter book has people "taking the mickey out of" each other, which sounds like they are teasing each other if I understand the context. In Irish slang that sounds like castration and none of the kids were drinking butterbeer at the time so I think the British have yet another meaning for the word.

[The_Omen]

Your name is Tom Greene.

[brig]

I'll stand up for the English...
Yes we do say 'taking the mickey', or 'taking the mick', and it does mean 'making fun of', in a rather more polite way that some others I can think of!

I don't know where it comes from, but I only found out yesterday that a similar phrase 'taking the p*ss', (don't know if other countries use that one?), which is a cruder way of saying the same thing, has an interesting history...

Go back to the time of Henry VIII.

In the textile industry a substance called 'Alum' (sp?) was used as a dye fixative (hang in there, it gets better...).
This substance was all imported from Italy. However, Henry VIII fell out with the Pope (ok, simplified a bit there!), and therefore had no access to the stuff we needed.

They found that a chemical process with urine and a type of shale from one particular coastal region (Whitby, North Yorkshire, where Dracula was supposed to have visited), produced the 'alum' (or whatever) and the problem was solved.

They collected urine from throughout the land, barrelled it up, and shipped it round the coast to Whitby.
However, at polite dinner parties the mariners didn't like to admit that all they did was ship urine, so they said that they shipped 'wine'. This euphemism became so common that the standard reply became "come on, you're really taking the p*ss, aren't you?"

What really freaked me out was that they still apparently collected urine in some areas until as late as the 1950's!!!
I wonder if you got paid for it...?

[Lisa]

You might be canadian if you buy your milk in bags.



It's funny, when I say "zed" on the phone at work most of the people go huh? Now I just stick to the phonetic alphabit.