Canada got a fun shoutout on American late-night television this week, and it had nothing to do with trade wars or the election — just some very Toronto slang that left Jimmy Fallon genuinely baffled.
American-Argentine actress and model Camila Morrone appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon this week to promote her new Netflix psychological horror miniseries, Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen. But the real highlight of the segment had nothing to do with horror — it was an impromptu crash course in Toronto street talk.
The Canadian Tutor Behind It All
Morrone picked up her Canadian linguistic education from her co-star Adam DiMarco, a Vancouver-born actor who apparently took it upon himself to give the LA-based star a full cultural immersion. The lessons ranged from vocabulary to pronunciation, and Morrone clearly took notes.
New additions to Morrone's vocabulary now include croski and mazza, along with quintessentially Toronto-coded phrases like "You're so cheesy" and "That's Gerber, fam." Morrone ran through the slang with Fallon during the segment, with predictably chaotic results.
The Pronunciation Lesson That Went National
Perhaps the biggest takeaway for American audiences: how to actually say the name of Canada's largest city. Morrone passed on the local wisdom DiMarco had given her — that if you're from Toronto, you say Toronno, dropping the second T entirely.
"Well, he's from Canada, and he taught me about Toronto slang," Morrone explained on the show. "But if you're from Toronto, you say 'Toronno,' which I didn't know. Like, if you're from there, you're like, 'Toronno.' I'm probably butchering it, and they're going to, like, kill me. But it's like, 'Toronno,' not 'Toronto.' You don't do both Ts. No way."
As any Ontarian knows — whether you're from Toronto, Ottawa, or anywhere else in the province — the double-T pronunciation is a dead giveaway that someone isn't local.
The Internet Had Thoughts
Not everyone in Toronto was charmed by Morrone's newly minted slang fluency. One X (formerly Twitter) user pushed back on the authenticity of it all, writing: "Nobody in the entire history of this city has ever thrown together the sentence 'two twos my word croski.'" Fair point.
Still, the clip made the rounds online with plenty of Canadians getting a kick out of seeing their local dialect go international — even if the execution was a little rough around the edges.
The Show
Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen is now streaming on Netflix. DiMarco, who has built a solid resume of Canadian and Hollywood productions, continues to be one of the country's quietly rising talents — and apparently one of its better unofficial tourism ambassadors, too.
Source: blogTO
