I was as born here as you can get, baptized into the thick of an uptown everywhere, raised to speak like a local boy in a town where local is a running joke. Global patois, the sound of one tongue wagging, standardized news anchor dialect. God I hate the English my parents gave me, no lilt, no music, no legion hall drawl, but a loose-necked wattle that will end its days a stroked-out lollygagging biddy dribbling polysyllabic goo from its mouth onto the quilted pattern of a paper bib. The flat bland turn of a Toronto phrase, the price I pay for a seat at the world’s hub.
Note: I shot the accompanying photograph while pressed against a window on the 50th floor of the TD Tower in the heart of Toronto’s financial district. You can tell that it’s a recent photograph (shot at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic) because there is no traffic in the streets below save a lone streetcar rumbling past. As for the poem … no, I don’t resent my parents. And no, I don’t hate the way I speak. But I do think it’s worth noting that there is a mysterious relationship between the speech of people like me (North American WASPs) and the aspirations of high finance, globalism, and their attendant ideologies. Orwell observed that the manipulations of language are important to the machinations of power. He observed it in the gradual impoverishment of vocabulary (newspeak). But he only identified half the matter. He failed to note a corresponding impoverishment of musicality in speech. I’m not sure why power would want to squeeze music out of the spoken word. Maybe musicality makes power afraid because it hints at things which lie beyond its control. Much like a novel coronavirus. Or a poem.