Canadians don't throw the "eh" around carelessly like you hear in TV shows or movies.

Hi Toastfriends, I don't know if I'll be around for the open thread today.

I lost my job this morning, and I am at a loss. I don't know what to do next. This job kind of fell into my lap back in November but just...didn't end up working out.

I am willing to do anything at this point, provided I get necessary training. If you or anyone you know have any leads on anything in the central NJ area, and are willing to train someone who may be completely new to your industry, please, please let me know. I am trying really hard not to cry but it's not working too good.

Also, unsolicited advice on switching careers when you don't know what to do or you're doing next is very, very welcome.

edit: I should specify that my training is in environmental remediation at current, with approximately 4 years experience.

I moved from Massachusetts to D.C. just about four years ago and the humidity melts away all my hardy New England stoicism, leaving a sad puddle of misery from May through October every year. Who thought it was a good idea to build our nation's capital on a swamp???

This is OT, but Toast related, and I won't be around later.

I was looking for something earlier at work, and found an old e-mail from a publishing house, telling us about the marketing campaign for a certain book. It was to be advertised in "all the womens magazines" (starting with Good Housekeeping), and directly below was "Online campaign" and the first website to be mentioned was The Toast!!
I have no idea if they ever actually placed the ad, and I'm not sure if they even got the demographics right (I haven't read the book yet, but I think that maybe the audiences of Good Housekeeping and The Toast are not so similar, apart from being mostly women), but it was such a wonderful surprise!

And I realised yesterday that The Toast has been in my life much longer than I remembered - I only started commenting last summer, but I was here for The Best E-Mail Mallory Ever Received or Sent, for Nicole's maternity leave, for the Butter launch... I think I first got here around the time Nikki was hired. And going through all the old articles, trying to find the first one I ever read, made me really sad again. Also the fact that The Toast is closing during the first time in years, if not ever, that I'm so busy I can't even check in regularly. But I'm so thankful to have had this site and community in my life, and to be able to continue to be part of it due to all the things that popped up in the last few weeks!
I'm going to DC this July, I am a naive young Canadian who's not used to extreme humidity or heat, am I going to survive? Should I shellac my makeup on to make sure it doesn't melt off my face?

I love me some Canadian linguistics 101 articles.

For your amusement, I would like to point out that Canadian raising affects other words too. Ask your local Canadian to say height/hide, louse/lousy, writer/rider, price/prize, strife/strive; I could go on. You'll hear a difference. :)

My favourite is writer/rider, because it's evidence that changes happen in a particular order. Raising only happens before a voiceless consonant (like t/s/f instead of d/z/v), but although the t in writer is pronounced like a d, we still raise the vowel. So our brain first raises the vowel, then voices the t, and then we say it the way we say it, all without even thinking!

I would ALSO like to mention that 'Canadian' raising does occur in some parts of the the northeastern and midwestern US.

One gift I have is picking out the secret Canadian actor on shows/movies. There will be just a slight touch of an accent, a speech pattern, or something that catches my ear and I'm almost always right.

Also! Canadians don't throw the "eh" around carelessly like you hear in TV shows or movies. There's a structure! For example, some show might have this as a sentence: "I'm gonna go down to the Tim Hortons, eh? And pick up a double-double." This would be an incorrect usage of the word! Don't go tossing it in the middle of sentences where it doesn't make sense.

As someone whose main exposure to Canadian linguistics is comparing the "aboots" of the various voices of Rocky in the children's show Paw Patrol while my brain melts, I enjoyed that piece. It will give me something else to think about while my kid watches that show, beyond "Why has a socialist paradise like Canada turned over all its public ulitilies to a bunch of dogs?"

Apologies to the people without small kids for whom this comment is gibberish.