Brought To You By The Letter U

The short version: Monday is Labour Day, a national holiday in Canada – expect Canadian offices to be closed and our Canadian colleagues to be either slow to respond or completely unresponsive, depending on how much fun they’ve had.

The longer version:

On Monday, Canadians will be celebrating Labour Day by not labouring; as many of you know, this is one of Canada’s National Contradictions, one of only two to appear on a calendar*.

Canada’s labour day has its origin in the Toronto Typographical Union’s strike for a 58-hour work-week in 1872, brought on by the demands of the British government for large quantities of the letter U. At the time, Us were aggressively recirculated to the British colonies to defend Imperial syntactic borders and maintain grammatical separation between British and American English. In fact, British grammarian propaganda from this period is the origin of the phrase “Us and Them”.

At the time, Canadian Us were widely recognized as the highest quality Us available, but the hard labour of the vowel miners and the artisans whose skill and patience made the Canadian Us the envy of western serifs is largely lost to history; few people today realize that “usability” once described something that would suffice in the absence of an authentic Canadian U.

Imperial demands placed on Union members at the time were severe. Indeed, in the weeks leading up to the 1872 strike the TTU twice had to surrender their private Us to make the imperial quota, and were known as the Toronto Typographical Onion in the weeks leading up to the strike. While success of the Onion’s strike dramatically improved working conditions for Canadian labourers, this was the beginning of a dramatic global U shortage; from 1873 until the late early 1900s, global demand for Us outstripped supply, and most Us had been refurbished and reused many times over; “see U around” was a common turn of phrase describing this difficult time.

Early attempts at meeting the high demand for U were only somewhat successful. In the 1940s the British “v for victory” campaign was only partially successful in addressing British syntactic shortages that were exacerbated by extensive shipping losses due to sunken U-boats. The Swedish invention of the umlaut – “u” meaning “u” and “mlaut” meaning “kinda” – intended to paper over the problem, was likewise unsuccessful. It wasn’t until the electronic typography of the late seventies that U demand could easily be fulfilled and words like Ubiquity could be typed casually, without the sense of “overuse” that had plagued authors for most of a century.

Despite a turnaround that lexical economists refer to as “The Great U-Turn”, the damage was done. Regardless of their long status as allies the syntactic gap between American and British Englishes was a bridge too far; anticipated American demand for Us never materialized, and American English remains unusual to this day.

Today, Labour Day is effectively a day Canada spends to manage, and indeed revel in the fact, that there are a lot of Us; travellers at this time of year will remark on the number of U-Hauls on the road, carting Us around the country in celebration. This is all to say that we’ll be celebrating our labour heritage this upcoming Monday. Canadians everywhere may be seen duing any number of thungs to commumurate this uccasiun: swumming, canuing, guardening, vusuting neighbours, and spunding tume at the couttage

Thunk you, und see you all un Tuesday.

– mhuye

* – The other being the Spring National Resignation, where Canadians repeatedly declare Hockey their national sport while secretly enjoying watching the Leafs choke away another promising start.