Legal Research

The Friday Fillip

By Simon Fodden

I have a cottage, where I go to get away from it all. (We won’t talk about how frustrated I am that it’s one of the few places in the province where there’s no cell phone signal and that high speed internet is simply unavailable…) And I have a friend who irritates me by persisting in calling my cottage a “cabin.” It’s only a word, I know. But each time he does it, I feel like the benighted Englishman in Germany who couldn’t come to terms with the fact that the locals called a knife a Messer: “I know that’s what they call it,” he said, “but damn it all, it is a knife.”

I felt a bit better when I came to realize he wasn’t doing it to annoy, because “cabin” is simply what New Yorkers call a cottage, and my friend is a transplanted New Yorker. I should have twigged earlier, because for many years I was fortunate enough to enjoy a little cottage in the Black Forest, where it and it’s kind were called “Hütten” or huts, and I never gave it a second thought. And, too, I did know that the English, benighted or not, mean something quite different by “cottage.”

A little bit of research — and I mean a little bit — shows me that the woodsy retreat out west is also called a cabin. And in Quebec it might be a “chalet,” or a “camp” in New Brunswick. For all I know, it’s bound to be known as a “shack” somewhere.

If perchance this Labour Day weekend you’re not kicking back at a shack / hut / camp / cabin / dasha / chalet / cottage by the lake, you might like to browse through some pics of tiny houses, because, the excesses of the rich notwithstanding, one signal feature of these glorious rural redoubts is that they be modest, though some of those pictured are admittedly less unpretentious than others.

And to go with that virtual shelter, here’s an audio file of the sound of lake water lapping against virtual shores.

Now close your eyes and say three times, “It is a cottage…”

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on September 04, 2009 (boomark / email).