Facebook has become hugely popular in Newfoundland and Labrador and, not surprisingly, some creative and enterprising fellow came up with a running joke - these days called a meme - featuring a fellow in a sou'wester.You will find it called "newfie word of the day". The text that goes with the picture involves a joke based on some mispronunciation of a standard English word or phrase and out of that comes some sort of joke.
The one above is an example. There are dozens more. The thing is quite popular as you can tell by searching the Internet for "newfie word of the day".
Memorial University's political scientist slash sociologist Jamie Baker has discovered that the guy in the picture isn't a Newfoundlander. He's actually Czech. The picture came from a post on a Northern Peninsula blog by cabinet minister Christopher Mitchelmore. It's about a Screech-in ceremony in the Czech republic that Mitchelmore ran during a visit there on one of his numerous globe-trotting ventures.
Baker posted the link on Facebook and asked folks to give them their thoughts. Feel free to do so by sending him an email: jbaker at mun dot ca. Baker's also written about about nationalism and racism, if this interests you. He got some notoriety last week not for this "newfie" meme story but for one on a paper he wrote about young people's attitudes to the word "newfie." He interviewed 30 university students and found that among the young people, the word is either an insult or no big thing. You can find a CBC story about it, one from Radio Canada, and one from NTV.
