Grant's Tomb

Brandon Sun - ONLINE EDITION

Prince Eddy or Prince Eddie?

The Prince Edward Hotel at 100

Saturday, Jun. 23, 2012 at 11:07 AM | Comments: 2

FROM THE BRANDON SUN, OCT. 27, 1979 Enlarge Image

I think my favourite of the abbreviations is when they use an apostrophe, even though, in this example, it's backwards.

One of my earliest journalism blunders was when I wrote a story about the 2nd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, based at CFB Shilo, and referred to them as the "Princess Pats".

The morning the story appeared in the paper, I received a phone call from the base in which I was politely (but firmly) informed I had printed not just a mistake — but an insult.

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I wouldn’t call the Queen "Hey, Liz!" would I? And it was just as disrespectful to refer to a princess (or her infantry unit) by a diminutive version of her name. They were the "Princess Patricia's", or 2PPCLI, if I needed an abbreviation.

Not only was I chastened, I was impressed by the seriousness with which the military took the matter.

So I was struck, doing research on the Prince Edward Hotel, to find that Brandon residents didn’t seem to give it the same respect.

In my writing, I’ve tried to avoid shortening it jocularly, but there are times when the colloquial has seemed to fit better, and I haven’t avoided it entirely.

What interested me, though, was that there were two versions of the spelling.

The first shortened version I can find calls it "the Eddie" — in 1957. A decade later, in the 1960s, a columnist referred to the "Prince Eddy" as a meeting location, and "Prince Eddy" made it into a headline after a basement fire.

But it was rare to see the nickname in print. Perhaps people spoke of it that way, in the vernacular, but in print, the paper was careful to say "Prince Edward Hotel."

That is, until the hotel closed. Suddenly, the headlines were full of the back-and-forth battle over the building’s future.

And in those headlines, there was also a back and forth between "Eddie" and "Eddy" — with an occasional leading apostrophe making it "the ’Eddy."

By the end of the ‘70s, though "Eddie" made a strong go of it, it appeared that "Eddy" was the preferred usage. Interestingly, however, the wider world was converging on "Eddie" as the shortened form of Edward.

A look at Google’s Ngram Viewer (above), which charts the popularity of words through its corpus of scanned manuscripts and books, finds both variants nearly neck-and-neck through the 1940s–70s, even though "Eddy" had been much more popular earlier in the century.

After about 1980, however, the two versions diverged again — and this time "Eddie" became the more popular spelling. Musicians Eddie Vedder, Eddie Money and Eddie Van Halen all use the -ie, as do comics Eddie Izzard and Eddie Murphy. Professional cyclist Eddy Merckx is probably the most famous recent Eddy-with-a-y.

Except in Brandon, where recent usage has confirmed that, colloquially, it’s the Prince Eddy, not the Prince Eddie.

Of course, that’s not its real name.

The short form may be an affectionate nickname, but I think I’ll stick with calling it the Prince Edward. It was a grand, elegant building. I think it deserves to be remembered with respect.

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Posted by:Reg Knourek

June 26, 2012 at 5:21 PM

Why American Grant's Tomb ;surely something Canadian would be appropriate?

Posted by:Grant Hamilton

June 27, 2012 at 8:39 AM

It's partially a play on morbid newspaper terminology -- "killing" a story, archives are called "the morgue" -- and also, obviously part of my name. Got a Canadian suggestion that's just as pithy?

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