DCHP-1 Online

outside ((n.))

• 1a n. originally among fur traders and now generally in the North, the settled, civilized parts of Canada; civilization.

  See also: go outside  inside ((n.))  

  • 1827  (1927)  He was to bring in the last letters from outside which we could expect until next spring.
  • 1898  Many of these are men who have just arrived from the outside, sold their outfits at good profits and are going out, disgusted with the country.
  • 1941  Only the Arctic existed for them; and everything that lay below the Mackenzie River, was to them the remote, the virtually non-existent "Outside."
  • 1964  These people--the shopowners, clerks, trappers and prospectors of the far-north community--see him as their representative "outside."

• 1b n. on the outside, in the civilized parts of Canada; in those parts other than the North.

  See also: outside ((adv.))  

  • 1898  On the outside last winter when the item that flour sold in Dawson for $ 125 a sack appeared in the papers the public gave a greater squirm of surprise and astonishment than it did when hearing of some fabulous strike on Eldorado.
  • 1964  We don't look down on people for the slight mistakes they make the way they do on the outside.

• 2 n. that part of Canada away from the isolated interior valleys of the western mountains.

  • 1919  "When I'd just got enough sowbelly to see me to the outside I pulled my freight."
  • 1965  The only communication with the "outside" was the CPR telegraph at Carmi.