If it's 1990 this must be the '90s. But the new millennium won't begin until the year 2001 POLITICAL TERMINOLOGY: The other day a writer raised the question of administration: isn't it an Americanism, and therefore to he 'Shunned, to write of the Mulroney administration? Well, yes and no. The OED, whose section A?Ant was printed in January 1884, gives as the fifth meaning of administration "the executive part of the legislature; the ministry; now often loosely called the 'Government.We can take it, then, that in the early years of Confederation the Macdonald administration or ministry would have been standard, the Macdonald government loose. But move on a very few years to the OED's entry for government, and we find it has become respectable: "in England, synonymous with ministry or administration"; and James Bryce is quoted as having written in 1888: "In America people usually speak of the President and his ministers as the 'administration,' not as the 'government."' Thus what had been standard British usage in the mind of the writer of the administration entry had already turned into an Americanism. Today there is one clear difference between Canadian and American usage in this matter. If you listen carefully to political comment on the U.S. television networks, you'll find that when Americans say the government they mean the whole shebang ?? the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary. When we say it, we mean the cabinet and the civil service. J. R. R. Tolkien objected to using it at all. In 1943, writing in an anarchist mood to his son Christopher, he said: Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it could he an offence to write it with a capital G or so is to refer to) people. If people Acre in the babit of referring to "King Georges council, Winston and his gang," it would go a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy. It's emphatically an Americanism to refer to one of the candidates in a riding during an election campaign as the incumbent. When an election is called, Parliament has been dissolved. Front then until after the election there is no House of Commons and therefore there are no incumbents. In the States, of course, the old Congress is still in being when the new Congress is elected. Robert Fulford draws my attention to an article by Robert McKenzie, the admirable Quebec correspondent of the Toronto Star, in which he attributes the obsessive use of the word Canadian, which I wrote about in the December issue, to the Trudeau Liberals; he says it was "probably in reaction to the new use of the word 'Quebecois' rather than 'Canadien?francais.'" The point of McKenzie's article is that Jean Chretien is carrying the process a step further by deliberately speaking of the national rather than the federal government, in order to annoy Quebec nationalists. I had already intended to point out that federal is another overused word ?? in February I got very tired of reading about federal Finance Minister Michael Wilson's federal budget. As for national, there's really no contradiction in its use for both Quebec and Canada, except in the ears of the hearers. It's perfectly possible for more than one nation to exist within a nation?state, whether that state is federal or unitary. As I've remarked before in these pages, Britain is a nation, and so are England, Scotland, and Wales. There are some ?? including Fulford who regret the passing of the term Dominion. I don't. But I'd better save up my reasons for another time. CALENDAR QUESTIONS: On the last day of 1989, a front?page article in the Toronto Star denied that the 1990S would begin next day. "No matter how you calculate it, experts say, the '80s have another 12 months to go." An official of an observatory is quoted as saying, "The trouble is that, like it or not, we're still stuck in the '80s." This is a good example of the treatment of language as Subject to arcane rules that require explanations from instead of being a matter of experts, common sense. A decade is a period of 10 consecutive years. Thus any year can be regarded as the beginning of a decade if we choose; and we certainly do so choose when the penultimate digits of the ten years are the same. Of Course we're in the 1990s in 1990. What we are not yet in ?? and this was what the stargazing expert was thinking about ?? is the last decade of the 20th century. That begins next year and ends with the last day of the year 2000. If I'm still present in that year I'll refuse to join in any celebrations of the new millennium until the first of January 2001. But I doubt if anyone will pay attention, any more than they did it) 1967, when I told anybody Who Would listen that it wasn't the centennial (if Canada: Canada already existed in 1867, and what happened that year was that Nova Scotia and New Brunswick joined Lis ?? with many misgivings. When did Canada start, then I We might pick 15 3 5, when Jacques Cartier thought his hosts at the town of Stadacona were telling him the name of the country, whereas they were really saying that there was Another kanata (town) upriver. But I'd choose 26 December 1791, when the Constitutional Act creating Upper and Lower Canada went into effect. Shall we have a bicentennial Boxing Day party next year?