A word about the title—Wally (as he was known to most of us) was vitally interested in the English language, including, of course, Old English, which he taught. So it seemed appropriate to use Old English words as attributes to his memory. Perhaps this whole tribute should be in Old English, or, more appropriately, in one of the rarer dialects of Canadian English. But I shall be more realistic. All of you knew Wally personally and/or by reputation. You can fill in gaps from your own remembrance of him.

Gōd Wīs Secg: ‘He wæs gīd’ in all senses of good—a good scholar, a good colleague, a good husband and father, a good friend, a good Canadian, a good citizen of the world. Secg? ‘Secg’ is an interesting word because in the masculine form it means ‘man, warrior, retainer,’ and other things, but in the feminine it means ‘sword.’ Secg is glossed as a poetic word, so I chose it in preference to, say, wer, or man; for Wally had a kind of poetic quality. Formidable in appearance and in scholarship—a fighter, a linguistic swordsman who could be overwhelming—he was essentially a kind and gentle person. Never one for self-praise, he carried his learning lightly and, like a retainer or servant, he was ever ready to share his knowledge and to assist the rest of us.

Walter S. Avis was so thoroughly a Canadian that it is perhaps necessary to take special note of his contributions to the international community of scholars devoted to the study of English and the English-speaking peoples. Certainly his broad perspective is everywhere revealed in his scholarship. In his study of Canadian eh?, for instance, he speaks of the corpus he collected when his reading was “arbitrarily limited to books in my own library, to newspapers and periodicals that passed normally through my hands, to radio and TV programs, and to such oral examples as I had the opportunity to observe and set down” (1978:174). Yet such “arbitrary limits” encompassed writers and speakers who represent Britain, Canada, the United States, South Africa, and Australia and covered uses from the eighteenth century to the present. With the best of scholars, Avis was meticulous, thorough, wide-ranging, and devoted to the real evidence of real people speaking and writing.

Le corpus de la présente étude a été établi à partir de 145 enquêtes sur le terrain, réalisées entre septembre 1971 et juin 1972 dans 18 paroisses de caractère francophone, établies avant 1875 et situées dans une zone circulaire d’environ 65 milles qui a pour centre géographique la ville de Sherbrooke. Le choix dés informateurs s’est fait à partir d’une liste dressée avec l’aide du curé ou du secrétaire de la municipalité, ou d’un(e) président(e) de club ou de cercle de l’endroit: l’informateur devait être francophone, né de parents qui habitaient la paroisse et dont au moins l’un des deux y était lui-même né, il devait être âgé de 20 à 65 ans et disposé â recevoir les deux enquêteurs après un premier contact par lettre puis par téléphone et qui exposait très brièvement le but de la visite.

Many of the hours I passed learning from Wally Avis were spent discussing practical problems of lexicography. Because of this, and because my tribute to him is being published elsewhere (English World-Wide 1:1, 1980), it seems appropriate to honour him here by dealing with one such problem, especially one that no one has satisfactorily solved. I refer to the treatment in monolingual English dictionaries of idioms—those elusive, hard to define, and harder still to classify phrases that appear usually in boldface as numbered or listed subentries.

Perhaps the most common type of idiom so defined is the fuzzy phrasal verb, and Wally was constantly intrigued by the anomalies of such apparently simple examples as start up. We can say, “Let’s start up the car” and “Let’s start the car up”; we can say, “Let’s start up the hill” but not “Let’s start the hill up.”

In a modest way, I have something in common with Webster, Mencken, and Avis, the three spokesmen for linguistic autonomy whom I am discussing. True, St. Noah of Amherst ascended to that great lexicographical office in the sky fifty-eight years before I was born; and as varied as my dreaming has been, I have never dreamed of meeting him. Nevertheless, we share a common birthday, October 16; and in the line of duty, I have often been entangled with his successors and their critics, especially with the critics of Merriam’s Webster’s Third New International.

With Mencken, my relationship was more direct. I had heard vaguely about The American Language in my South Carolina boyhood, when—in the eyes of the southern Baptists who dominated my community—Mencken metaphorically had horns, hoofs, and a tail. But I never read it till 1937, two years after I acquired a Ph.D. as a Miltonist. I had gone to the Ann Arbor Linguistic Institute, under orders from my college president (a retired four-star general) to improve my teaching and my use of the language.

One of the many aspects of the study of Canadian English which the late Walter S. Avis pioneered was the study and analysis of the literary representation of a Canadian dialect, first in his M.A. thesis, “The Speech of Sam Slick” (1954), subsequently in the “Note on the Speech of Sam Slick” in the introductory matter of R. E. Watters’ Sam Slick Anthology (1969), and the application of that study in the edition he prepared of that text for linguistically naive modern Canadian readers. Like all those who work in Canadian English, those of us working on the Linguistic Survey of the Ottawa Valley owe a great debt to Walter Avis, not only for his outstanding work in the lexicography of Canadian English and his studies of the Loyalist based dialects of Southern Ontario, but also for many more immediate favours and services: his whole-hearted support of our project, his answers to queries about particular lexical items, his visits to the project and the commentaries he made on our tapes and our transcriptions of them and, outstandingly, his willingness to let us borrow tapes which he himself had made of Valley speakers, and to let us use them for our own purposes. The study which follows tries to reflect something of our debt by discussing the literary representation of another Canadian dialect, one which is spoken within the area under investigation by the Linguistic Survey of the Ottawa Valley, and one heavily influenced by the Loyalist dialects of Southern Ontario which feature so largely in Avis’s work. The dialect in question is the dialect of Glengarry County, Ontario, and more particularly the two northern townships of Glengarry County, and the representation of the dialect of that area in the Glengarry novels of Ralph Connor.

In the summer of 1954 a small group of scholars met at the University of Manitoba and founded the Canadian Linguistic Association. Among us were Henry Alexander of Queen’s University, J. B. Rudnyckyj of Manitoba, W. S. Avis of R.M.C., G. Dulong of Laval, and J.-P. Vinay of Montreal.

My association and friendship with them all began at that time, and in particular I formed a close personal and academic relationship with Wally Avis.

Thanks to the support of Wilfred Wees, who has done more than any other Canadian publisher to support studies in Canadian English, Dr. Avis, Dr. R. J. Gregg of British Columbia, and I began work on a series of dictionaries, culminating in 1967 with the publication of the Dictionary of Canadianisms, of which Dr. Avis was editor-in-chief. During the preparation of that work, Dr. Avis and I became close friends. In 1963, he spent a full year at the University of Calgary, and in 1965 he was able to devote the entire summer to editorial work at the University of Victoria.

Dr. Johnson impugned his fellow dictionary makers by defining a lexicographer as a harmless drudge. Were a present day dictionary maker to take a Johnsonian editorial liberty and use Walter S. Avis as a personal example in defining lexicographer, that famous definition would need to take a very different form. One would have to include such adjectives as generous, tireless, dedicated, farseeing, and innovative. Avis knew circumstantially that the modern lexicographer can occasionally be elevated above the status of mere “harmless drudge,” but certainly Dr. Johnson could not have been expected to anticipate the kind of dilemma Avis described in “Trade Names, Lexicographers, and the Law” (1978).

Comme le faisait justement remarquer A. M. Kinloch dans une récente notice nécrologique (Kinloch 1980), le nom de W. S. Avis est indissolublement lié—avec celui de mon collègue et ami M. H. Scargill—à l’expansion des études de linguistique canadienne, domaine anglais: “it is no belittlement of the work of C.J. Lovell or of other of his associates to say that it was Avis who put Canadian English on the map.” II est done normal de placer la présente note sous l’égide de Avis, et j’en profite pour rappeler les contacts fructueux qui ont existé entre nous tout au long des années 1950 et 1960. Je voudrais cependant adopter ici une perspective un peu différente de la sienne, celle des canadianismes pancanadiens, si l’on peut dire, en ayant à l’esprit le problème très concret d’un dictionnaire bilingue français-anglais à l’usage des Canadiens (Vinay 1962). Je me propose d’examiner brièvement les différents critères retenus par les auteurs pour cerner le concept de canadianisme; et pour compléter l’image que Avis donne du mot canadianism, je ferai porter l’accent sur l’aspect français de la question.