Two hockey players are standing in an arena parking lot, both wearing tank tops and clearly manicured haircuts, and they address the camera directly. They are presumably speaking English as they lead their audience through the finer points of firing a snap shot, but it is never quite that clear.
Player One: “So the first step in taking a snap-bomb, a couple dangles.”
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Player Two: “Couple dangles with the biscuit; just celebrate it a little.”
Player One: “Celebrate the biscuit a little, you know? A little back and forth, a little how’s she goin’.”
Player Two: “A couple dangles gets the tendy movin’ a little bit, tendy’s off his rocker.”
They discuss the importance of “toeys,” doing it “ferda” and going “bar-downski” with the shot.
They are both fictional characters, supporting players in the Canadian comedy Letterkenny, but their vocabulary has been borrowed from real dressing rooms. Creator Jared Keeso, a former junior hockey player himself, exaggerates their dialogue for comedic effect, but he did not invent their language.
For a variety of reasons, hockey players have successfully developed a rich tapestry of jargon that thrivesinside arenas across Canada. To dangle the biscuit is to stickhandle the puck, a process during which a skater may execute a toey (toe-drag) to freeze the tendy (goaltender) in order to score a goal ferda (for the boys).
“This language, this dialect, has just taken on a life of its own,” says Keeso. “There’s certainly enough of it out there that I can craft entire two-to-three-page scenes with these guys.”
He suggests there is a certain charm to the language of hockey.
“There’s nobody who talks like hockey players, except hockey players,” Keeso says. “If you’re not a hockey player, you’re not allowed to talk like that. And if you do talk like that, a hockey player will bring you back to earth really quick.”
Does it qualify as its own language, though?
“Your guys, your hockey guys and the rest of it, they’re speaking English,” says Michael Connolly, a professor of linguistics at Boston College. “They’re just injecting a jargon into their language.”
Only the vocabulary is different. The sounds hockey players use – both inside and outside Letterkenny – are the same as any English speaker, Connolly says. The sentence structure is the same.
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“It fits English structure,” he says. “So it is English. And even when every word is weird, it’s still English.”
As Keeso suggests, hockeyspeak is kind of like membership in a club.
“Masons and fraternal orders oftentimes have these weird words that they’ll use with one another so they can recognize each other right away, and other people don’t know them,” says Connolly. “It’s shutting out people with a membership into a club.”
The vocabulary can grow and spread quickly within hockey circles. An example might be seen in Gary Roberts, the former Maple Leafs forward. More than a decade ago, during his stay in Toronto, he had a habit of addressing those in conversation as “bud,” as in “hey bud.”
Roberts was a veteran in that room. And as he emerged as a fitness guru to some of the game’s brightest young stars – Jason Spezza to Steven Stamkos to Connor McDavid – the usage of “bud” could spread.
“You need a group that’s together a fair bit,” says Elaine Gold, director of the Canadian Language Museum. “It’s very often associated as the ‘in crowd.’ You know who you can speak this language with – other people at the rink.”
And hockey is the quintessential group to foster this kind of language development, says Sali A. Tagliamonte, a professor of linguistics at the U of T.
“You’ve got the locker room, and you’ve got competition and you have bravado,” she says. “You have all the things that would clearly lead into a manner of speaking that’s unique to hockey.”
LetterKenny courtesy of Bell Media
Beth Houze was working toward her master’s in linguistics at the U of T when she decided to base one of her term papers on Sidney Crosby. Her hypothesis was that, after a decade spent living in the United States as a member of the Pittsburgh Penguins, he would lose some of his Canadian pronunciations.
She focused on how he pronounced words such as house, out, about and doubt. She tracked them over more than a decade, from the time Crosby was 14 until he was 28, poring over hours of interview footage available online.
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“What I actually found was that there was no change,” Houze says. “Crosby continued to speak in exactly the same way. That seemed kind of weird to me. And what I then was hypothesizing was that hockey identity is a barrier to change.”
Canadian speech, she says, is entrenched in the room.
“To speak Canadian is to speak hockey,” she says. “So even his American teammates would have some of the Canadian features.”
Sometimes, it can be out of necessity.
When Cassie Campbell made the Canadian world championship roster for the first time, she was paired with Nathalie Picard on the blue line. The issue – Picard barely spoke a word of English, and Campbell could not speak a word of French.
“We literally communicated in hockey terminology,” Campbell says. “I remember I made a bad pass at camp, and I was all upset. I was a young kid. I came back to the bench. She just looked at me. She tapped me on the leg and she said, ‘park it.’ And that was it, you know? Like, ‘carry on.’”
And, as part of keeping with the in-group, the vocabulary has to evolve. If a word goes mainstream, the group has to develop a new word to separate it from the outside world.
Ray Ferraro, the retired NHL forward now working as a TSN analyst, can remember hearing the word flow (hair) when he was a player. They had chiclets (teeth), and a colourful way of describing someone’s physical appearance: “If a guy had bad skin, you’d say he had bad bark.”
He had never heard the term pigeon used on the ice, though, at least not as a player. That is one of the relatively new insults, he says. And it is common. Basically, it means to suggest a player is not working hard for the goals they score – that they live off the garbage of others.
“We weren’t that sophisticated,” Ferraro says with a laugh. “Pigeon is a new one. It used to be just like, ‘you’re a f—king loser,’ or something like that. We were more primitive, I think. We weren’t as advanced as today’s athletes.”
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Keeso, the creator of Letterkenny, has cast two relatively young former players to spread the language of hockey on the show. Dylan Playfair, the 24-year-old son of former NHLer Jim Playfair, is Reilly, the player with the golden flow. Andrew Herr, a 25-year-old with experience in junior hockey, is Jonesy.
Both are returning for the show’s second season, which debuts on Dec. 25, on CraveTV, the on demand video steaming service from Bell.
Keeso makes a point of reaching out to younger players at least once a year, just to get a sense of what new words have been added to the vocabulary. Recently, he discovered that “ferda” – short for “for the boys” – was no longer in circulation.
“They said ‘ferda’ is old news,” Keeso says with a laugh. “Nobody says ‘ferda’ anymore.
