My Canadian stepson uses bloody, wanker, bollocks, twat and a few others.

I have no idea where he got that from. Youtube maybe.

Not another whinge about abuse on the homefront !

No.

I must admit to a similar annoyance when I went to a wedding recently and it was almost a carbon copy of ours... a church service in which they blatantly copied our promises to love each other till death do us part, and they even had the cheek to copy what we were wearing - a kilt for me and an ivory dress for the woman. To add insult to injury, they then replicated our hosting of drinks and a meal in a local hotel, followed by a band and a disco until the early hours.

The unimaginative bastards.

Canadians pick up bits of language that they find different like Magpies, but, certainly here in my bit, it's because they haven't got a huge vocabulary, and I think it's quite complimentary (my son's friends all now refer to School Crossing people as Lolipop men or women, and, oddly, everyone in my office finds the term "a bit cross" for less than furious but more than irritated, to be wonderful and use it liberally) it's just that they haven't been exposed to much change.

Atlantic Canada is now getting slightly more outsiders coming, but has remained relatively untouched socially for a long time and it's very much affected the spoken word here, people don't 'play' with language in the same way that they do in more changing societies (even more so when you come to the French language - but that's a whole different brouhaha ) I really miss the richness and fun of British language at it's best, London had such a diverse set of people coming and going from so many backgrounds that the linguistic soup changed virtually daily - which must be going on in the GTA or Vancouver too where you have a larger population?

Surely the internet now means we all copy each other doesn't it? If we fancy a bit of Bollywood Bling or Pastoral whatever, at the push of a button Pinterest is all over it. Canadians though, I think, are generally conservative, they don't want to go out on a limb to be different, so if you have done something nice with your house and garden, or wedding - it's going to be copied, so enjoy it OP it makes you a fashionista! Although that word is probably very much not in vogue now.

...but I bet they'd be miffed to read that last line.

My wife adopted a pronounced "not my cup of tea" (an expression I don't think I ever used) after my complaints that her "tastes like shit (or dog's vomit) were somewhat over the top and insulting.