CHATECHATECHATE
Someone from Oakville showed me this article. The mystery is solved....kinda chate though.
How a boy's name became slang
Siri Agrell
National Post
Saturday, October 07, 2006
When John Chater was a 15-year-old kid, he thought he was pretty much like every other hockey-playing, Led Zeppelin-listening boy.
He dressed in the uniform of '80s adolescents who were not preppies -- in jeans and long-sleeved T-shirts.
His hair was also long, his teenage moustache there, but not as full, or as wispy, as other boys his age.
He played sports and partied "as much as the next guy."
The youngest of eight siblings growing up as part of a working- class family in an upper-class town, the now 36-year-old Mr. Chater considered himself an average teen.
But history has offered a slightly different appraisal.
In the two decades since his high school years, his name has taken on something of a mythical quality in Oakville, where he grew up.
A derivative of his surname --"chate" -- is a popular piece of local slang coined in his honour by hockey teammates in the early 1980s and used by teenagers in Oakville ever since.
The word even has its own entry on the Web site Urban Dictionary -- meaning "to rip off" or get a "shitty deal."
"Say you're going to throw the ball in the net and someone like, checks you and knocks the ball away. That's totally chate," explained 17-year-old Mitchel Tell, standing outside White Oaks Secondary School this week.
It is the same school that Mr. Chater attended in the 1980s, back in the days when it was called General Wolfe High School and he was the only one called by his last name.
"I know it started somehow from me," he said recently. "I just can't believe they're still using it."
Words coined for a person's surname are called eponyms, and generally start with someone who represents a specific action or attribute.
"Presumably the individual is the epitome of whatever the characteristic is," said Jack Chambers, a University of Toronto linguistics professor. "There are words we use every day that we don't think of having originated from surnames, but they pass into regular use exactly like this."
The word martinet, for example, describes someone who demands strict obedience, and can be traced to the French army officer Jean Martinet, who was, Mr. Chambers explains, "such a nasty son-of-a-bitch that his name forever stands for all nasty sons-of-bitches."
Similarly, Thomas Bowdler was immortalized after editing the "bawdy bits" out of Shakespeare, replacing Lady Macbeth's "damned spot" with a "crimson spot" and killing off Hamlet's Ophelia by drowning instead of suicide. To "bowdlerize" now means to edit a text prudishly.
In the case of "chate," Mr. Chambers said the word's birth is a sort of metonymy, where a part stands in for the whole or an individual comes to represent a whole category, as in Thermos or Kleenex.
While the verb "to chate" is the more popular usage, "chater" is also a well-known noun at Oakville Trafalgar High School, where it has come to represent kids who smoke, wear leather jackets and generally resemble the stars of the Canadian independent film FUBAR.
Looking back, Mr. Chater acknowledges he dressed "like a bit of a rocker" in his day, but no more so than any of his friends. They all wore plaid lumberjack "stoner coats," as they called them. And class photos reveal he was hardly the only boy with long hair or a teen 'stache.
Mr. Chater's family lived just off Kerr Street in Oakville's west end, in a quiet, comfortable neighbourhood that is a far cry from the large, multi-level homes of Old and East Oakville.
The city of 150,000, like many suburban enclaves, offers a segregated upbringing for a lot of teens. Their social lives revolve around school cliques, their paths rarely straying beyond the well-manicured lawns of their own particular neighbourhood.
But by the ninth grade, Mr. Chater was playing on a rep hockey team, meeting boys from other schools -- and other social classes.
Among his teammates was Mike Vanderjagt, then a student at White Oaks Secondary School and now a starting kicker for the NFL's Dallas Cowboys.
Rob Zamuner was there, too, a young player who would go on to the NHL, as well as Todd Taylor, who attended Oakville Trafalgar High School, in the rich, east end of town.
It was this group of guys who first used Mr. Chater's name in a different context -- not to call for to him to pass or shoot, but to describe a perceived slight.
John began to hear references to being "chated," having something stolen or scammed, and wondered what the word had to do with him.
"I was like, "OK, what did I take of yours?" Mr. Chater remembers. "Did I do something stupid?"
He tried not to pay any attention to the new piece of slang, but said it made him uncomfortable that the word implied some sort of wrongdoing.
Once, at a bar, he asked a friend what it meant, but did not think much of it when his friend declined to answer.
It may have been a reference to a hockey move, he contemplates now, as he was something of an enforcer on the ice, and may have "chated" his opponents by shutting down their plays.
But according to Oakville residents around at the time, the term had more to do with how Mr. Chater looked than how he acted.
In the high school yearbook, Mr. Chater resembles a hard rock version of Sean Penn's character in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
In one snapshot, he is sitting at a table beside his laughing buddy, a long-sleeved Van Halen tee displaying a shirtless Eddie in all his glory. Mr. Chater is hunched over a pad of paper and a booklet titled Ways with Words, all mischievous teenage eyes and thick, dark locks.
"The name was based on the Sebastian Bach-like hair flowing from the back of his helmet," said Peter Armstrong, a CBC correspondent who attended Oakville Trafalgar in the 1980s, referring to the frontman of the rock band Skid Row. "Mr. Chater is the stuff of legend."
But the legend seems to have little to do with the man himself.
Outside of Mr. Chater's direct circle of friends, "chate" became synonymous with something outside of his control or influence, referring more to kids who steal beer than those who steal pucks.
"Maybe that's the way they looked at me," Mr. Chater said recently of the term's connotations. "I was from the other side of town. The guys I played hockey with, they had a lot of money. My family didn't 'cause -- eight kids, right?"
Mr. Chambers said that naming social groups in this manner is "very much a high school phenomenon."
"High school is a subculture that is insular in the way that villages or small towns used to be insular," he said. "So you get this adolescent networking and lots of linguistic changes."
Outside of adolescence, there is not much reason to describe people who wear denim and concert T-shirts, smoke outside during the day and cruise around in beater muscle cars.
But in high school -- especially a high school environment where such style of dress or behaviour is not the norm -- the need to name that sub-set is obvious.
"It's a category that needs to have a label in youth culture, and it just happened to get this guy's," explained Mr. Chambers. "If I were him, I would be proud as could be."
Meeting Mr. Chater today, it is hard to imagine the word "chate" being related to such a polite, unassuming family man.
He lives in Cambridge, having left Oakville about five years ago. He is a little league coach and the father of two adorable little Chaters, Emily, 6, and Austin, 8. He has been married for 12 years. He still plays hockey in a men's league, but now his teammates refer to him as "old guy."
His hair is mostly gone, his wife, Anne, took care of that shortly after they wed. She was studying to be a hairdresser at the time, and lured him into her chair with the promise of a trim.
Stripped of his locks, his stoner jacket and his Van Halen tee, John Chater does not look remotely like someone who would give you a "shitty deal."
He is understandably nervous discussing the linguistic resonance of his high school persona -- how comfortable would you be talking about your 15-year-old self with a stranger who has arrived at your door?
Mr. Chater stopped being a "chater" after graduation, but the word had already taken on a life of its own.
In his twenties, he attended a house party in Oakville where he didn't know many people, but when he introduced himself, a strange thing happened.
"They were like, 'You're Chater? No way!' " he recalled.
Soon, a group had gathered around him, arguing about whether he was in fact, The Chater.
"They were like, 'everybody knows you,' " Mr. Chater said. "I was like, 'OK, news to me.' "
Outside White Oaks Secondary School this week, Mitchel Tell was also incredulous, believing that he and his friends had coined the term themselves.
"No way," he said when told the word was around before he was born. "I've been using that word since I was, like, 13."
In the ensuing four years, Mitchel has been "chated" on various occasions.
"If a teacher gives you a lot of homework at the last second, I'd be, like 'Miss, this is so chate,' " he explains.
Video games can be "chate" if you can't get past a certain level and drug dealers can "chate" you if they're off on their "count," not that Mitchel would know anything about that.
"It means stingy or unfair," he says.
But the word does not hold that meaning everywhere, and he knows it. Mitchel has spent time in Hamilton and Brantford, where his language does not translate.
"They had no idea what I was talking about," he said of his friends outside of Oakville. "In Brantford, they used chintzy, which is so not the same."
Such localized language pops up across Canada, almost always among the population's slang-speaking teens. In Barrie, there is a local word for "wedgie." There, the act of pulling a person's underwear up over their pants is called a "bursie."
Elaine Gold, also a linguistics professor at the University of Toronto, has also heard "treads," a Saskatchewan term for "someone who's kind of stupid, as though they'd been run over by a car."
"Youth culture develops words and they spread like crazy," she said.
The term "chater" would have become popular as much for its shape and sound as for its connotation, she added.
It ends in "er," like baker or teacher, a form of word that often gets turned into an adjective.
But no matter how easily a term rolls off the tongue, kids would not use it if it didn't make sense to them.
"Words like that stick where there's a need for them," said Ms. Gold. "And obviously this describes a group that nothing else seems to."
Even Mr. Chater found a use for the term recently, while describing his Halloween costume last year.
He had bought a long, black wig and torn the sleeves off an old jean jacket, pulling it on over a long-sleeved T-shirt. He headed out on the town as the former, "stoner version" of himself.
When it was pointed out that he had actually dressed up as a "chater," he smiled and nodded his head in agreement.
"Yeah," he said. "I guess I did."
How a boy's name became slang
Siri Agrell
National Post
Saturday, October 07, 2006
When John Chater was a 15-year-old kid, he thought he was pretty much like every other hockey-playing, Led Zeppelin-listening boy.
He dressed in the uniform of '80s adolescents who were not preppies -- in jeans and long-sleeved T-shirts.
His hair was also long, his teenage moustache there, but not as full, or as wispy, as other boys his age.
He played sports and partied "as much as the next guy."
The youngest of eight siblings growing up as part of a working- class family in an upper-class town, the now 36-year-old Mr. Chater considered himself an average teen.
But history has offered a slightly different appraisal.
In the two decades since his high school years, his name has taken on something of a mythical quality in Oakville, where he grew up.
A derivative of his surname --"chate" -- is a popular piece of local slang coined in his honour by hockey teammates in the early 1980s and used by teenagers in Oakville ever since.
The word even has its own entry on the Web site Urban Dictionary -- meaning "to rip off" or get a "shitty deal."
"Say you're going to throw the ball in the net and someone like, checks you and knocks the ball away. That's totally chate," explained 17-year-old Mitchel Tell, standing outside White Oaks Secondary School this week.
It is the same school that Mr. Chater attended in the 1980s, back in the days when it was called General Wolfe High School and he was the only one called by his last name.
"I know it started somehow from me," he said recently. "I just can't believe they're still using it."
Words coined for a person's surname are called eponyms, and generally start with someone who represents a specific action or attribute.
"Presumably the individual is the epitome of whatever the characteristic is," said Jack Chambers, a University of Toronto linguistics professor. "There are words we use every day that we don't think of having originated from surnames, but they pass into regular use exactly like this."
The word martinet, for example, describes someone who demands strict obedience, and can be traced to the French army officer Jean Martinet, who was, Mr. Chambers explains, "such a nasty son-of-a-bitch that his name forever stands for all nasty sons-of-bitches."
Similarly, Thomas Bowdler was immortalized after editing the "bawdy bits" out of Shakespeare, replacing Lady Macbeth's "damned spot" with a "crimson spot" and killing off Hamlet's Ophelia by drowning instead of suicide. To "bowdlerize" now means to edit a text prudishly.
In the case of "chate," Mr. Chambers said the word's birth is a sort of metonymy, where a part stands in for the whole or an individual comes to represent a whole category, as in Thermos or Kleenex.
While the verb "to chate" is the more popular usage, "chater" is also a well-known noun at Oakville Trafalgar High School, where it has come to represent kids who smoke, wear leather jackets and generally resemble the stars of the Canadian independent film FUBAR.
Looking back, Mr. Chater acknowledges he dressed "like a bit of a rocker" in his day, but no more so than any of his friends. They all wore plaid lumberjack "stoner coats," as they called them. And class photos reveal he was hardly the only boy with long hair or a teen 'stache.
Mr. Chater's family lived just off Kerr Street in Oakville's west end, in a quiet, comfortable neighbourhood that is a far cry from the large, multi-level homes of Old and East Oakville.
The city of 150,000, like many suburban enclaves, offers a segregated upbringing for a lot of teens. Their social lives revolve around school cliques, their paths rarely straying beyond the well-manicured lawns of their own particular neighbourhood.
But by the ninth grade, Mr. Chater was playing on a rep hockey team, meeting boys from other schools -- and other social classes.
Among his teammates was Mike Vanderjagt, then a student at White Oaks Secondary School and now a starting kicker for the NFL's Dallas Cowboys.
Rob Zamuner was there, too, a young player who would go on to the NHL, as well as Todd Taylor, who attended Oakville Trafalgar High School, in the rich, east end of town.
It was this group of guys who first used Mr. Chater's name in a different context -- not to call for to him to pass or shoot, but to describe a perceived slight.
John began to hear references to being "chated," having something stolen or scammed, and wondered what the word had to do with him.
"I was like, "OK, what did I take of yours?" Mr. Chater remembers. "Did I do something stupid?"
He tried not to pay any attention to the new piece of slang, but said it made him uncomfortable that the word implied some sort of wrongdoing.
Once, at a bar, he asked a friend what it meant, but did not think much of it when his friend declined to answer.
It may have been a reference to a hockey move, he contemplates now, as he was something of an enforcer on the ice, and may have "chated" his opponents by shutting down their plays.
But according to Oakville residents around at the time, the term had more to do with how Mr. Chater looked than how he acted.
In the high school yearbook, Mr. Chater resembles a hard rock version of Sean Penn's character in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
In one snapshot, he is sitting at a table beside his laughing buddy, a long-sleeved Van Halen tee displaying a shirtless Eddie in all his glory. Mr. Chater is hunched over a pad of paper and a booklet titled Ways with Words, all mischievous teenage eyes and thick, dark locks.
"The name was based on the Sebastian Bach-like hair flowing from the back of his helmet," said Peter Armstrong, a CBC correspondent who attended Oakville Trafalgar in the 1980s, referring to the frontman of the rock band Skid Row. "Mr. Chater is the stuff of legend."
But the legend seems to have little to do with the man himself.
Outside of Mr. Chater's direct circle of friends, "chate" became synonymous with something outside of his control or influence, referring more to kids who steal beer than those who steal pucks.
"Maybe that's the way they looked at me," Mr. Chater said recently of the term's connotations. "I was from the other side of town. The guys I played hockey with, they had a lot of money. My family didn't 'cause -- eight kids, right?"
Mr. Chambers said that naming social groups in this manner is "very much a high school phenomenon."
"High school is a subculture that is insular in the way that villages or small towns used to be insular," he said. "So you get this adolescent networking and lots of linguistic changes."
Outside of adolescence, there is not much reason to describe people who wear denim and concert T-shirts, smoke outside during the day and cruise around in beater muscle cars.
But in high school -- especially a high school environment where such style of dress or behaviour is not the norm -- the need to name that sub-set is obvious.
"It's a category that needs to have a label in youth culture, and it just happened to get this guy's," explained Mr. Chambers. "If I were him, I would be proud as could be."
Meeting Mr. Chater today, it is hard to imagine the word "chate" being related to such a polite, unassuming family man.
He lives in Cambridge, having left Oakville about five years ago. He is a little league coach and the father of two adorable little Chaters, Emily, 6, and Austin, 8. He has been married for 12 years. He still plays hockey in a men's league, but now his teammates refer to him as "old guy."
His hair is mostly gone, his wife, Anne, took care of that shortly after they wed. She was studying to be a hairdresser at the time, and lured him into her chair with the promise of a trim.
Stripped of his locks, his stoner jacket and his Van Halen tee, John Chater does not look remotely like someone who would give you a "shitty deal."
He is understandably nervous discussing the linguistic resonance of his high school persona -- how comfortable would you be talking about your 15-year-old self with a stranger who has arrived at your door?
Mr. Chater stopped being a "chater" after graduation, but the word had already taken on a life of its own.
In his twenties, he attended a house party in Oakville where he didn't know many people, but when he introduced himself, a strange thing happened.
"They were like, 'You're Chater? No way!' " he recalled.
Soon, a group had gathered around him, arguing about whether he was in fact, The Chater.
"They were like, 'everybody knows you,' " Mr. Chater said. "I was like, 'OK, news to me.' "
Outside White Oaks Secondary School this week, Mitchel Tell was also incredulous, believing that he and his friends had coined the term themselves.
"No way," he said when told the word was around before he was born. "I've been using that word since I was, like, 13."
In the ensuing four years, Mitchel has been "chated" on various occasions.
"If a teacher gives you a lot of homework at the last second, I'd be, like 'Miss, this is so chate,' " he explains.
Video games can be "chate" if you can't get past a certain level and drug dealers can "chate" you if they're off on their "count," not that Mitchel would know anything about that.
"It means stingy or unfair," he says.
But the word does not hold that meaning everywhere, and he knows it. Mitchel has spent time in Hamilton and Brantford, where his language does not translate.
"They had no idea what I was talking about," he said of his friends outside of Oakville. "In Brantford, they used chintzy, which is so not the same."
Such localized language pops up across Canada, almost always among the population's slang-speaking teens. In Barrie, there is a local word for "wedgie." There, the act of pulling a person's underwear up over their pants is called a "bursie."
Elaine Gold, also a linguistics professor at the University of Toronto, has also heard "treads," a Saskatchewan term for "someone who's kind of stupid, as though they'd been run over by a car."
"Youth culture develops words and they spread like crazy," she said.
The term "chater" would have become popular as much for its shape and sound as for its connotation, she added.
It ends in "er," like baker or teacher, a form of word that often gets turned into an adjective.
But no matter how easily a term rolls off the tongue, kids would not use it if it didn't make sense to them.
"Words like that stick where there's a need for them," said Ms. Gold. "And obviously this describes a group that nothing else seems to."
Even Mr. Chater found a use for the term recently, while describing his Halloween costume last year.
He had bought a long, black wig and torn the sleeves off an old jean jacket, pulling it on over a long-sleeved T-shirt. He headed out on the town as the former, "stoner version" of himself.
When it was pointed out that he had actually dressed up as a "chater," he smiled and nodded his head in agreement.
"Yeah," he said. "I guess I did."