To Steve Parks, in re "starving": My mother (English/Irish ancestry, born in Montreal in 1929, lived 40 years in Ottawa) would say "starving of the hunger" to remove all doubt.

Someone above mentions "stupid o'clock" -- anyone hanging around in Canadian military circles will soon hear "zero dark thirty" to mean an unspecified hour between midnight and dawn, and "zero dark stupid" to mean an unreasonably early pre-dawn hour.

In re "crab" for RAF: in the Canadian Navy of the 1970s, I learned that airmen were "crabfats", from the greyish colour of the RCAF uniform, similar to that of the grey paint used in Royal Navy ships, which was always called "crabfat". Oddly enough, this usage has survived 30 years, although the paint association has disappeared, perhaps because the Canadian Navy does not have nearly as much contact with the Royal Navy as it used to. I recently heard a youngish petty officer recounting a fanciful bit of folk etymology concerning the non-existence of fat on a crab. Among soldiers (then "pongoes", now "grunts"), airmen were "pigeons", and their arrival in the Junior Ranks' would be marked by cooing sounds. If one wished to start a fight, the thing to do was remark (loudly) that the canary would be a more representative bird, as they are too yellow to fight but too cute to shoot.