I've just returned from a writers' conference at the Banff Centre for the Arts, one of Alberta's great contributions to Canadian culture. The Centre offers extraordinary facilities in which artists can meet, and if the meeting lags, there are always those great slabs of rock rising into the sky all around, sunlight and cloudshadow playing on them.
This was a gathering of writers, but some of the writers were historians. Lynne Bowen, the British Columbia historian of Vancouver Island coal miners and much else, was describing how "Boss Whistle," the phrase she coined for her early 1980s book with that title, has gone into the local idiom.
"Boss Whistle" was Lynne's own way to evoke how the minehead whistle dominated miners' lives: start work now, stop work now, no work today. It's a good book Boss Whistle; you should look it up and read the powerful passage at the start that presents the power of Boss Whistle.
Nowadays no one around Naniamo does anything about local mining heritage without using the phrase. Lynne was a little ambivalent about how easily her own image has been appropriated -- (no one credits the originator!). But I'd say creating fresh idiom is what writers are for.
Ted Bishop, an Edmonton writer at the conference, was explaining how his recent book Riding With Rilke sets out an analogy between the shock of a motorcycle accident (he knows that in his bones) and the shock of archival discovery. I know archives better than choppers, but the way he suggested the comparison makes me think it's a book archives rats ought to look out for.
