Rex Murphy

"I am sometimes asked how to get a "handle" on Newfoundland. The best route is simply to visit for a good while. The second best, and not as subject to the inclemencies and sadism of Torbay's volatile weather, is to visit the Dictionary of Newfoundland English . . . the finest, most scholarly (and enjoyable) compendium of Newfoundlandia that there is.

Bio last updated February 25th, 2019.

Rex Murphy

Articles by Rex Murphy

  • The Conversation

    Rex Murphy answers questions his way at a Convivium event in Vancouver

    Then, providentially or otherwise, an oil boom was going on in Alberta and people like my closest friend, destroyed by the three or four years that he didn't work, got divorced, gave his house to his wife — because we're fairly civilized down there and when they break up, they do those things — and ...

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  • The Conversation: No Need to Shout

    Any Canadian hearing Rex Murphy speak would guess at once he is from Newfoundland. No one treated to his upper-register vocabulary and literary phrasings would be surprised to know that he was a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford. The combination is perhaps why the journalistic icon remains almost shockingly personable and engaging.

    His most famous line was 'Who speaks for Canada?' I love the idea that Trudeau pressed, and pressed very hard, for the things that bind us together; the things that give us common energy; the things that if something happens in Bonavista, a small town on the east coast of Newfoundland, it should mea...

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