Quote Originally Posted by Peter C. View Post
I have wondered what the language is like in Canada. In England we say queue rather than line, but wicket is new to me unless it is a post like a wicket in cricket.

When I first came to the US to visit my wife-to-be we found ourselves in the KFC opposite Gracelands in Memphis. We went to order and the woman behind the counter recited the menu to us. When she finished I said to my fiancee, I will have the same as you, as I did not understand one single word the woman had said.

Peter
Actually, Peter, Steve was exaggerating. It was funny, but apparently misleading. Given that 90% of Canadians live withing 100 miles of the USA border and we have been exposed to US mass-media for our whole lives, our linguistic idiosyncrasies have mostly vanished - merged into a sort of Los Angeles/New York universal American English. Part of the issue is that kids always think "the other" is better, so they imitate US spelling and pronunciation.

By the way, you will find that the cricket definition for wicket is the third in The Concise Oxford Dictionary. The usage Steve refers to once was common in England. In the case of a post office or bank, the wicket is the little window through which you make your transactions. This just proves that language evolves.

If you took 50 people born and raised in Canada in the last 40 years, I doubt that more than twenty would know any definition for wicket, and of those twenty, I'd guess that seventeen would have the cricket definition.