Last week I found myself saying the words 'I hope it was a rat'. Not a phrase I ever imagined myself saying in any of my 40 years in the UK. What sentences have you said during your Canadian lives that you couldn't have imagined uttering in the UK?

What a line!

i dont understand the significance of the rat and your hopefulness.

Something got into the duck shed and attacked our ducks. The dogs heard the commotion and their barking chased it off. It was either a rat or a mink, a rat can injure but would struggle to kill an adult duck, a mink can and would kill all of them, just for fun. I assume that whatever it was will revisit at some point - hence the hope that it was a rat.

I've seen a pen full of rabbits that had all been killed by a weasel, and it was shocking. I think 7 or 8 rabbits spread all over the pen, each hit in the neck and laying where they dropped. It looked like the weasel just drank a little blood from each one and moved on.
What I'm going to do is, if and when I'm at work again with a co-worker, pretend to see something in the shadows and say "I hope it was a rat." Just as a bit of apocolyptic dark humor.

I've not actually said it but "it is what it is" has entered my thought process whereas in the UK I would never accept something just because that's they way it's done.

I may have uttered 'have a good day' and possibly even 'perfect' but never awesome.

That bloody 'perfect' It's the same as the much repeated 'amazing' - casually thrown out about things that are neither perfect or amazing. Gets my Grumpy Old Woman goat.

This is from a good few years ago during my traveling years, but it's memory has stuck with me.

"Eat the damn marmot, it tastes just like dog"

Well come on - did you eat the marmot?
If the answer's 'yes', you know what the next question is!

I hate to ruin the whole premise of your thread, but you could just as easily have been saying that in the UK. A mink got in to our guinea pigs hutch and killed all 3 of them here. Well done to your dogs (ours were bloody useless and didn't even bark!).

Are they hush puppies?

I was going to shoo you out but you already went.

I'm guessing HG's idea was that she wouldn't have been keeping ducks in the UK in the first place.

We ate the marmot and I'd say it tasted boiled, as had the dog meat we had eatten earlier. The weird thing was realizing that dog was the new chicken.
The marmot was on a hitch hiking trip in mongolia, the truck stoped for a few hours, time to hunt and cook the marmot, cooked by placing hot stones in the pan, rather than the pan on the fire.