Winnipeg reporter
“Evidently Humpty Dumpty was very angry, though he said nothing for a
minute or two. When he did speak again, it was in a deep growl.
” ‘It is a most provoking thing,’ he said at last, ‘when a person
doesn’t know a cravat from a belt!'”
– from Through the Looking Glass
Alice couldn’t tell the difference between Humpty Dumpty’s neck and
waistline. That’s what led her into trouble, and you really couldn’t
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blame her because the giant egg man was rather rotund.
On a recent trip I took to the United Kingdom, my British relatives in
a number of locations faced an equally unsettling and embarrassing
situation with me, and you really couldn’t blame them for my haughty
and offended reaction because it wasn’t very rational.
It involved an oilseed, which you might think is an odd thing to be
discussing on holiday. But my relatives, knowing I work for a farm
newspaper, often spoke about farming in their country and wanted to
know about farming in Canada.
As soon as they mentioned the word “rapeseed” as one of the crops
farmers grow, I would interject with a pointed question about whether
they meant “canola.”
This would sow confusion and awkwardness into the conversation, because
they didn’t know what I was talking about, and the scientific, dietary
and historical difference between rapeseed and canola wasn’t all that
interesting to them.
But I made them sit through tiresome descriptions of how the original
rapeseed plant had been modified by Canadians to become the crop we now
grow, and that’s why we now call it canola.
I’m sure they were thinking “Let’s get off this topic” as I was
rattling on, and afterwards I would wonder why I was getting so wound
up about it.
I guess it comes from a deep sense of grievance about Canada not
getting credit for one of its great inventions, and my seeing in the
refusal of foreigners to adopt the new name a conspiracy to deny us our
due. It’s just like the British pretending that Lennox Lewis is an
Englishman, when Canada took him fair and square from Jamaica.
I hope my British relatives remember me as someone other than a bore
who got oddly worked up about agricultural nomenclature.
But sometimes you just have to fight for what’s right, even if it seems
a bit silly. Perhaps that’s what Humpty was thinking.
