Posted on 12/12/2006 1:36:27 PM PST by GMMAC
Quebec swears by its English curses
But church-related expletives spoken in French not accepted on TV
Toronto red Star
December 12, 2006
SEAN GORDON
QUEBEC BUREAU CHIEF
MONTREAL - In English Canada it is among the baddest of the bad words, a wash-your-mouth-out-with-soap, four-letter epithet considered unsuitable for polite company, never mind broadcast.
And yet, it is heard almost daily on Quebec's f-bomb friendly airwaves, where French-speaking hosts and their guests cheerfully throw the word around as a colourful alternative to "heck."
The 1.6 million viewers of Tout le monde en parle, Radio-Canada's top-rated Sunday evening television talk show, are routinely treated to the planet's most popular monosyllabic Anglo-Saxon curse.
High-profile newspaper columnist Richard Martineau recently used the expletive on the show coupled with its popular companion "off" in his war of words with novelist Dany Laferrière (who had called Martineau an intellectual midget.)
This past weekend, the comedian and satirist Christopher Hall casually deployed the two-word form of "go forth and multiply" on Ouvert le Samedi, a popular Radio-Canada public affairs program.
"You have to look at the context. It's universally understood to mean `oh, darn' ... it's used as an exclamation, like `wow,'" said Hall, whose outburst prompted giggles and minor tut-tutting from the program's host.
But Hall said while he can get away with stevedore language in English, it would be a different matter if he swore in French.
"There would be official complaints, and you'd be out of there ... saying `tabernacle' on the air would be like saying the f-word to your grandmother," said Hall, who regularly appears on both radio and television in Quebec.
Private talk radio and television shows adopt a similarly laissez-faire view of one of the English language's most powerful taboo words.
And yet the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission's broadcast regulations state no broadcaster shall permit "obscene or profane language."
But that phrasing contains a key loophole: is the f-word obscene to francophone ears?
"No, it doesn't mean anything," said ethnographer Jean-Pierre Pichette, who's written on the subject and compiled a dictionary of French-Canadian swear words and expressions.
If anything, the francophone ear typically mistakes the oath for "phoque," which is the French word for seal.
But Pichette said use of the expletive goes beyond linguistic incomprehension those steeped in the French-Canadian swearing tradition typically use bad words as a new form of punctuation.
"Swearing has become trivial now ... it's seen as a way to assert credibility and force, it's a popular intensifier of arguments," said Pichette, a professor at Université Sainte-Anne in Nova Scotia.
Whereas French Canadians have a long and distinguished history of using church-related swear words, the traditions in English Canada mirror the well-established scatological and sexual roots of most anglophone expletives.
That explains why eyebrows are seldom raised when words like "tabernacle" or its phonetic form "tabarnak" are uttered by French-speakers on English broadcasts.
Such words, and others like "calice" or chalice, and "ciboire" or ciborium, are still considered moderately scandalous in Quebec. Indeed, the Radio-Canada ombudsman has received several complaints about inappropriate language on its shows.
The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council is the body that accepts complaints from the public and can forward them to the CRTC, which has the power to levy fines and other punishments. According to the most recent figures, complaints about offensive language have fallen steadily in the past two or three years.
Communication policy expert Pierre Trudel, a law professor at Université de Montreal, said the CRTC has moved away from "decency" in favour of the more elastic and subjective criteria of "obscenity."
"That means individual remarks are interpreted in the context of the audience, of society's tolerance for them," he said. Earlier this year, the Montreal Catholic Archdiocese made headlines with an ad campaign that featured massive posters emblazoned with swear words like "calice" and "tabernacle" and their dictionary definitions. It was an attempt to both reclaim the words and give greater exposure to the Church.
Hall saw the provocative campaign as a comedic opportunity.
"I used them all on the air," he said. "It was the only time I have ever been able to say those words on Radio-Canada and I got to pin it on the Church."
I also remember it was used a lot in the movie "The Commitments"
Back in 1970, I worked with some French-Canadian guys in the bush outside Pine Point, NWT.
"Tabernak!" has a damning force that must be heard to be believed. I think it's the 'ba-da-bing' pattern. ;^)
--my command of Frog is almost zero--what am I missing about "tabernacle"--??
Yeah, why are "tabernacle" and "chalice" dirty words there?
Is this some Freudian thing (in that the words now refer to a woman's and man's private parts, respectively)?
But surely it does mean something to people who are bilingual.
When you're fourteen and sitting in language class, "merde" or "mierda" or "Scheiße" are just funny sounding words. If you keep up with the language you studied and come across such a word as an adult, you know what it means and roughly what its impact on native speakers is.
Unrelated , but one of my former collegues who worked in northern Quebec for some months considered it to have the most corrupt government that he had encountered--
What? The? Phoque?
What the phoque!
It's actually "va te faire foutre." Not that I'm telling you to do it, of course... ;-)
PS... "la foudre" means "lightning"
From what I understand, in Canadian (and maybe generally) french, "merde" does not have the same sort of connotation as the English equivalent. "Tabernac" is a strong swear word in Canadian french, but not in Parisian french, again from what I understand. What do they use for comparable impact in Parisian french, I wonder?
They are all words associated with the Catholic church, and up until the middle or so of the last century, Quebec was a place where the Catholic church had a very strong hold. So by using those words in that context, it was very much a profanity, in the true meaning of the word.
It means something, but there's no emotional connotation. I remember my first visit to Quebec when my French-Canadian buddy (we were seated around the dinner table with his very Catholic Mom and Dad) started off (in French) with f*** this and f*** that.
I was shocked but Mom just smiled and kept eating. But if he so much as muttered "chalice" under his breath, she beat him with both fists.
Il a tout fucké l'affaire just means "he screwed up." And if you translated it literally with the equivalent French verb, it wouldn't bother many.
French Canadians are pretty blasé about sex. But even though most of them don't go to church anymore, don't even think about using religious terms as oaths.
The talking parrot had been warned by it's owner to cease the obscene curses that it's previous owner had taught it, to which the irreverent bird would respond "Hell yes!" or "ahhhh sh*t!", finally the owner, a respectable church lady could take no more, and took the parrot, opened the freezer and put him inside to think over his wayward speech.
Inside the darkened freezer, the parrot is rustling his feathers trying to stay warm, his eyes adjust to the darkness and he sees a frozen Butterball turkey, to which he says, "BAWK! What in Hell did YOU say, *F--K*?!?"
Yeah I know it's old but it's still funny. :)
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