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sample page 3 from What's in a Canadian Name?
Joseph Philippe Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau
1919–2000
The constitutional lawyer and Liberal writer became the fifteenth prime minister of Canada. He was the first one born in the twentieth century. Holding the prime minister’s office from 1968 to 1979 and again from 1980 to 1984, Trudeau became one of the most influential figures in modern Canadian history.
During his years of political power, a hoary folk etymology, very common and very wrong, made the rounds about Trudeau. You could ask anyone on the street in Québec and be told that Trudeau was, bien entendu, from trou d’eau, a supposed old term for water hole. And of course there were vulgar jokes told that depended on this spurious etymology. In stark linguistic fact, Trudeau as a surname goes back to a remote ancestor who bore the Germanic warrior name Trudo. The root is Old High German drud, which meant ‘strong, hardened, tough, mighty.’ So frequent a first name was it in very early French that we find the name in ancient church records with a full Latin declension: Trudo, Trudonis, etc. Quite the opposite with our little water hole trou d’eau which is never found in print. Trou was simply not used like this in early French. Trou indicated always an absence, a hole that was empty. Even in the most recent French coinages using the word, this holds true. For example, the English astronomical term black hole is translated in current French by trou noir.
The other tiny linguistic giggle associated with Trudeau’s early career in politics concerned the initials of his name, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, namely P.E.T. It so happens that le pet is the French word for fart. Not only schoolboys but also his political opponents stooped to cheap puns involving French words like péteux and péter. Trudeaumanie (Trudeaumania) was punned about as pétomanie (pre-existing noun coined by French writer Alfred Jarry meaning ‘taking an insane delight in farting’).
published by McArthur & Company
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