Cadillac

You mean the luxurious, once-fancy car was named after a Canadian? Well, sort of a pre-Canadian. The Yanks claim Cadillac too. But they are quite inaccurate. Check out the French plaque below. Antoine Laumet de Lamothe Cadillac (1658–1730) was born in Upper Canada and was active in New France, later Québec, by 1691 where he was a commandant and fur trader. A few years later he founded a fur-trading fort at Detroit, hence the name of General Motors’ luxury car, Cadillac. Charges of empire building sent him down to Louisiana as governor from 1710 to 1717. Further charges of sharp dealing propelled him with great wealth to sail across the Atlantic and retire to France in 1718 loaded with swag where he set up as a plutocrat and died in that mode.

His family name of Cadillac began as the name of a place near Bordeaux and of a little town in the Dordogne that springs from the name of a Gallo-Roman territory of ancient Gaul, Catiliacum, itself composed from a Latin cognomen mentioned by Cicero and Pliny Catilius and the Latin locative suffix -acum. Catus, an adjective in street Latin, meant ‘smart, intelligent’ and the noun catus was a tomcat. The diminutive of that noun catulus meant the young of any animal, especially puppy or kitten, and was the nickname of an ancestor of the greatest lyric poet of ancient Rome, Catullus.

So, if you renovated that pink Caddy convertible, flaunt it, dude, and drive it knowing that Antoine Laumet de Lamothe Cadillac approves of every corner screech you make.

 

To Screenge

This Saskatchewan localism is a verb that means ‘to barge in front of someone while in a line.’

Sample Sentence: No screenging goin’ into the movie tonight at the mall.

 

Aborenglish

In the patois of rural Canadian Indians, Aborengish is any blend of an aboriginal language and English. Here’s one example, a kind of mañana expression from Ontario Ojibwa:

Mnaah wiinak — but tomorrow.

Whatever, dude! But I’ll do it tomorrow.

 

bécosse

In Quebec French, this unique Canadian word is literally ‘an outhouse or outdoor privy,’ but with the punning, developed meaning of a person who is a real ‘shit disturber.’

Lui, le vrai bécosse parmi les autres!

translation: In that group, he’s the real bad apple!

To an English speaker, the most interesting thing about bécosse is that it is a Quebec Frenchification of the English term back house, meaning ‘outdoor toilet.’

Outhouse sweetened with wistaria

 

Tight Clothing Pun

Her jeans were so tight you could read her lips.

• It is always a downer to have to explain cheap puns, but when I tried this out on five different people, I was astounded to discover that not one of them knew that labia is the Latin word for lips and may refer to the lips of either the mouth or the vagina. Of course, the reference here is vaginal. The labia majora are two long folds of skin, one on each side of the vaginal opening, that make up the outer, larger lips of the external female genitalia. The labia minora are the smaller skin folds at the vaginal opening, inside the labia majora, extending back from the clitoris.

In linguistics, a labial is a sound produced with the aid of the lips, contrasted for example with a dental, a sound that needs the tongue touching the teeth in order to be produced properly.

To you, the one who swooned, dropped her Japanese airing fan and fainted away, collapsing on her brocaded settee, due to the loutish vulgarity of my last entry, I say this to you, O repressed, delete-mad, bleep-prone expurgatrix: Mayhap a commodious misting from milady’s aerosol of revivifying ammonia would awaken you to blushing consciousness, much as dauntless Hermes led Hell-weary and cheek-pale Persephone up, up from the stygian murk of Hades? But I think the world might prefer if milady remained out cold.

 

© 2009 William Gordon Casselman

 

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