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I no longer remember why I made a comment about salmon in a team meeting last week. It seems an odd subject to arise in a team meeting.
What I do remember is the guy beside me saying, “Salmon? Or salll-mon?”
He said it in a clearly joking sort of way, and I thought he was just play-correcting me about something silly because the long meeting was coming to an end and we could afford to be a bit goofy. So I rolled my eyes playfully and said, “Sammon [sic], of course! Nobody says salll-mon.” But something in his face gave me pause. “Or…do they?” I added, suddenly not so sure of myself.
“Yes,” said another guy, directly across from me. I looked up and saw him looking at me with a smile.
“They do?” I said, still not quite sure they weren’t messing with me.
The guy across from me, a Canadian, said, “Yes. Canadians do.”
In that moment, two things happened for me. First, I was taken straight back to the moment I first learned to pronounce the word “salmon” and that the ‘L’ is silent. (Which, to be fair to me, I always thought was stupid–I hate the word because of that silent ‘L’. It never made any sense that we don’t pronounce it.) And I realized I never technically learned that everyone in the English-speaking world who says that word pronounces it without the ‘L’; I only learned that we do, here in the US. I only assumed the rest, and had been assuming it for decades.
Second, I immediately remembered a book called Room, by Emma Donoghue, that had come out 14 years earlier. This book was hugely popular at the time and it seemed like everyone I knew was reading it, so I had gotten it from the library. It’s about a kid who has spent his entire life in a single room with his mother, and whose entire concept of the world is thus based only on this room. Because of this, he’s never read a book before. And there’s a moment when the boy, narrating, is explaining something his mom told him not to do because “she says you get salmon”. He was talking about salmonella. Growing up in my world, where no one pronounces the ‘L’ in salmon, this didn’t make any sense. The only way a boy who had never seen either of these words written out before would get them confused is if the ‘L’ in salmon was pronounced.
This angered me. It seemed to me like a lazy slip by the author–how had it not occurred to her that it wasn’t logical for the boy to say this? I instantly deemed the book unreadable, believing it must be full of logical inconsistencies like that if something this obvious had slipped past both the author and the editor, and quit reading it then and there. My disbelief, I determined, could only be suspended so far and could not stand up to any more of that.
As soon as that memory came back to me, a light bulb went on over my head. I Googled the author, and sure enough: Emma Donoghue is Canadian. Not just Canadian, but Irish-Canadian. (Although I have no idea how the Irish refer to this tasty fish.)
In more ways than one, I had lived up to the old truism about assuming things. Maybe it’s time I give that book a second try.
(Now I remember why I brought up salmon in that meeting–we were joking about the shade of red one guy’s face had suddenly turned upon being asked to put his money where his mouth was. I dubbed the shade “salmon pink”.)
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