Canadian dialectology: Timhortonese

All businesses develop their own register, the special vocabulary associated with their focus activity. The food business abounds in such registers; we know what kind of food to expect when we hear such terms as 'Big Mac', 'Blizzard' and 'Frappucino'. Regular customers come to pride themselves at their fluency in the register used at such establishments, and look down on the newbies who fumble their way through the simplest order.

The iconic Canadian coffee-and-donut store Tim Hortons has its own unique terminology, some examples follow:

• timmies: usual way of referring to Tim Hortons
• double-double: a coffee with two doses of both sugar and cream
• iced capp: short for Iced Cappucino, the cold coffee drink
• timbits: table tennis-sized balls of donut dough, with glazed or sugary coatings
• roll up the rim: a popular annual contest where customers unroll the rim of their coffee cup in order to see whether their cup is a winner
  

You can get Tim Hortons coffee and donuts in almost every corner of Canada and a few privileged areas of the US (mostly close to the border) but nowhere else in the world - until this year. A request from a general in the Canadian Armed Forces led to the opening of a Tim Hortons outlet in a very out-of-the-way place: Kandahar, Afghanistan. Kandahar is the main Canadian Forces base in Afghanistan, and Canadian soldiers serving six-month terms there were missing their caffeine fix. The outlet now serves up to 1,300 customers a day.

The cross-cultural nature of the Kandahar air base led to an amusing article on CTV.ca (found here) about the plight of non-Canadian soldiers trying to order from Tim Hortons. Soldiers from eleven other countries are taking advantage of the coffee, donuts, bagels and other treats, but their attempts to order require them to learn some Tim Hortons register. This has prompted the following reaction from Kelly Taylor, one of the Tim Hortons employees:

The confusion over the Tim Hortonese has Taylor vowing to put a Tim Horton-English dictionary on the door of the store. "I'm going to write a dictionary and post it on the outside of the door for all the non-Canadians. That's my job for the next week,'' she said.

As can be expected, some of the loudest chuckles are reserved for customers from the US:

The most humorous thing that happens at the Tim Hortons in Kandahar involves Canada's southern neighbours. "We're a bilingual country and we have English and French on the menu sign here, Taylor smiled. "We have gentlemen come up and ask for an apple fritter/beignes aux pommes, or an icecap/glace. It's pretty funny -- they're pretty funny."