The Great Big Fire in Vancouver June 13, 1886

Up until the 1940s in Vancouver, the anniversary date of the great big fire of 1886 was a civic event and remembered by many who were still alive at the time. An interesting thing about language and how it changes over time comes up in my mind every June when I think about Vancouver’s Great Fire of 1886. I always wondered why people called it “great”. Wasn’t it a catastrophe affecting every single inhabitant? Indeed it was, but I eventually realized that people were using the word “great” to indicate that it was big – not that it was wonderful. I don’t think people use “great” to mean big very much anymore except in poetic writing. But let me know what you think.

In the meantime, here is a column I wrote about the fire that was printed in the Vancouver Sun newspaper in 1997.

I remember the editor called me the morning it came out because she’d changed my first sentence and had made a mistake calculating the number of years since the fire had occurred. It was 111 years, not 101 as was changed in my piece. But I couldn’t really do anything about it so there the error stands in perpetuity – a mockery to my numeracy 😉 . Incidentally I also just noticed that my last name is spelled wrong on this piece. Oh well – could be worse, right?

Enjoy!