Today I received 5 emails containing a “deadline”. Looks like I am happy, if I make it alive into the new year then. I am not very picky with my language, and sometimes even guess the pronoun wrong. My apologies. But setting somebody a deadline, sounds a little rough even for me. Usually I set delivery or submission dates, not deadlines. Here is why: In the absence of barbed wire during the US civil war, POWs were restricted to leave jail by just drawing a line in the sand. Should a prisoner cross the line he was risking to be shot dead by the prison guard. That's the "DEADLINE". Another meaning from the same time is a quick line grave, for fallen soldiers or those deceased in a field hospital, like shown in the photo by A.J. Riddle, Andersonville Confederate prison (1864).
Another word, I hear a lot here in North America, is “guys”. Of course, it reminds me immediately of Guy Fawkes and the gunpowder plot, where Guy was picked for piling explosives under the House of Lords in an attempt to blow it up. These days on November 5th, the failure of this attempt is celebrated in the UK by burning puppets in a bonfire. Guy Fawkes is by some seen at the father of modern terrorism, and by others as the only man who ever entered parliament with honest intensions.
The Cambridge Dictionary defines a guy as “in the UK, a model of a man that is burned on a large fire on Guy Fawkes Night”. In the American dictionary, a guy is an unspecific man, or neutral just people. There seems also a root in the old French word guie, which is guide, perhaps somebody piloting a ship or steering a crane. In any case, a guy in 1835 was a "grotesquely or poorly dressed person". And this is, where I do see the connection to today’s Canada. Canadians definitely carried this definition into the 21st century. And suddenly, it all makes sense to me. Quebec is excluded of course.
One thing which did surprise me in Canada, by the way, was that outside Quebec, there is not much French spoken. Even all signing is in English and French, Canada is far from being a multilingual country. Most people don’t speak any French. I am actually missing a bit the opportunity to practice. I even met French high school teachers in Toronto, who speak worse than me. It’s strange people are not interested to learn French. But I can also not imagine why in the US, not many people speak Spanish, given the size of the Hispanic community. Even it’s not official, it’s interesting. I even learned a little Turkish back in Germany when I was a University student in Cologne living in Venloer Strasse.