Hi, I’m Wayne Jones. Welcome to Newfoundland Boy, part memoir but mostly about the culture, the people, and the vibrancy of Canada’s province called Newfoundland.
This is the first episode of the podcast and I want to say a few things about myself before getting on with it. I’m a retired academic librarian. That means I’ve worked in university and research libraries during my career, both in Canada and the US.
I was born in the Canadian province of Newfoundland. That’s the most easterly one, an island in the Atlantic Ocean. And for the record, the province also includes the land called Labrador, separated from the island by the Strait of Belle Isle. It’s about 40 km away by ferry.
And, I suppose, for those who don’t know where Canada is, it’s the big country just north of the United States.
The history of my life in Newfoundland (I’ve always lived on the island and in fact have never even visited Labrador) is pretty simple:
○ I was born in a place called Corner Brook in 1959
○ I lived there and in the capital city of Newfoundland, St. John’s, until I was 22 years old
○ With one exception, I think, I then lived outside of Newfoundland until I turned 64. That’s about 42 years in people years
○ A few years after I retired and moved back to Newfoundland, specifically to St. John’s, the capital city, in November 2023
And that’s it. So overall I’ve spent about twice as much time not living in Newfoundland as I have actually living here.
I like St. John’s a lot. I don’t know the city well from my years at university here, because we all almost exclusively stayed on campus, for study and for socializing. I can remember only a very few times when we ventured downtown. But I’m well settled here now, close to downtown—just up one of the many long and steep St. John’s hills.
My mother stayed with me for a couple of weeks earlier this month, as she was in town partly to visit my brother and me, and partly for medical appointments. She’s a fairly “easy guest,” as they say. Not demanding. Generally laid back. Doesn’t require elaborate meals and is comfortable just spending part of an evening watching a movie. On the other hand, I’m an introvert, and though I try to be a good host, I’m not used to having people, my mother or anyone else, in my domestic space for a long period of time. I told her directly that sometimes I would have to just go to my bedroom and be alone.
We took a break one day and drove to a Tim Hortons. If you’re Canadian, you know what this is: the largest chain of donut shops in the country. If you’re in a town of any size at all, just keep driving around and eventually you’re likely to find a Tim’s. And often you’ll find them on that stretch of highway that leads into a city, the one where all the fast food places are, and the vista almost looks like you could be heading into any North American city.
The one we went to is less than a kilometre from where I live, at an intersection where the street I live on changes its name and continues on a while before changing its name again. St. John’s is like that. It is, I suppose, technically a four-way intersection, but it’s not shaped anything like a plus sign or cross. No. It’s more like an upside-down T with a partially crooked bottom, and then another road coming out of the straight side of the bottom. Probably hard to visualize but like everyone else, I’ve gotten used to this kind of intersection in St. John’s, just so I can prevent myself from being involved in a car accident every day. My mother and I went in, had coffees and donuts, chatted and people-watched, and then drove back to my condo. All good.
But.
When I told my brother where I’d been, he told me that that particular Tim Hortons is known for being “skeety.” Yeah, there’s a word you likely have never heard before. It’s a word that I didn’t know at the time either. Newfoundland English is a real treasure: not only are there distinctive accents but there are many words that are unique to the place as well, or at least certainly not common in standard English. It has been well studied and Newfoundland is fortunate to have had a group of three scholars at the only university in the province, Memorial University, start to compile an authoritative dictionary in, I think, the 1970’s. The first edition was published in 1982 and then an updated on in 1990, and now it is freely available as a searchable database online (see the show notes for a link).
It’s not one of those books for tourists that a writer might compile, with a highly selective list of the funniest and quirkiest or weirdest-sounding words. It’s actually a highly accomplished work of scholarship, something that most of the provinces and states and other major subdivisions of most countries around the world have nothing even approaching.
So I looked up skeety (S-K-E-E-T-Y) and it wasn’t there. Or, more accurately, it isn’t there in the sense that my brother was using it in. In the dictionary, it’s a variant spelling of skitty (S-K-I-T-T-Y), a word meaning “a biting fly” or a mosquito. Well, this was disappointing. The word means seedy or questionable or rough, or in a bad part of town. In the case of this Tim Hortons, it’s apparently well known for where sex workers meet their clients, drug deals happen, drugs get consumed, and other shenanigans go on. A Newfie might say, “Dat Tim’s is right skeety, b’y.”
Canada is blessed with many good dictionaries, and in another one that’s now also freely available online, the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, you do get a sense of the meaning. It has the word skeet and labels it derogatory. A skeet is “a working-class youth associated with illicit activities (e.g. drinking, smoking), especially a male.” And there are examples that illustrate it being used, with descriptions such as
○ “Unemployed with 6 kids”
○ “someone who gets into trouble”
○ “A scofflaw scraping through life by any means necessary, without regard for social norms, rules, or remotely current fashion trends. A skeet is generally money poor (though you can be a rich skeet), not terribly well educated”
And so on. You can imagine how the word might develop into an adjective, and then suddenly a person or place is what you call skeety. My mother and I made it out of there pretty harmlessly and unnoticed. I didn’t have a hooker invite me for a date, and as far as I know my mother didn’t do any meth in the bathroom.
And that’s all for this episode. It gives you an idea of one of the types of episodes I’ll be making—an anecdote from my life which has some sort of lesson about Newfoundland. Sometimes the anecdotes, if that’s the right word, will be more serious. For example, I have plans to talk about my father’s abandonment of his new wife (my mother) and two kids, the psychotherapy that changed my life, growing up in a small city, and much more. I’ll also be interviewing experts about Newfoundland history and culture, as well as talking to regular citizens. I hope you stay along for the ride.
Thanks so much for listening. And please join me again on Saturday.