On sleeveenery and town halls.

As you know, Lynn tends to forget that not everyone speaks like someone who grew up in Western Canada; this is why she tends to have people go to the biff before eating their Shreddies and going to Grade 13. What you don't know is that she isn't telling the whole story about Canadian English. There's a useful little term Newfoundlanders use that fits someone we're about to meet in six months' time to a tee: "sleeveen."

The person who owns this term is, of course, the politician Elly tries to enlist in her crusade to save the town hall from the wrecking ball, Peter Radcliffe. We start things off with his being a bog-standard caricature who seemed to delight in frustrating Elly by not immediately acceding to her simple demand to be heard. What makes him a sleeveen is the fact that a prediction Mike made about how the pols would simply say "Great idea about saving the theater; glad I and I alone thought of it" if they saw the place came to pass. This is because he did not do what Elly would have expected to do and declare her to be right; what he did is steal her idea and do so in a manner that turns her public image into "that nitwit housewife who should have stayed home because they had this covered." That sort of slippery rascality and self-serving treachery is what is meant by the word sleeveen. Feel free to use it in a conversation.