Québec & Acadian Food Word

Chiard means ‘ground meat’ in Québec, and also has the more general slang senses of ‘grub’ and ‘chaotic mess’ and ‘foul up.’

Chiard also names a tasty fried hash: hamburger or leftover meat chopped up and fried with potatoes and onions, seasoned with the most popular herb in la belle province, savory.

Diced salt pork was once a favourite ingredient of chiard or chiards blancs (white hash because of the potatoes). Once fried, this “grub” would keep for a day or two, and could be packed as a meal for a fisherman, hunter, or trapper going out on a short trip. In fact, it has variant names like chiard de goélette ‘fishing-boat hash’ and chiard du pêcheur ‘fisherman’s hash.’

Extended figurative meanings occur as well, where un chiard is ‘a mess,’ ‘a large crowd of people,’ and ‘a small fight, a scrap.’ “Quel beau chiard!” “What a major-league screw-up!”

And there is Acadian chiard. Chiard (pronounced ‘shaw’) is also called pâté à la râpure, one of the most scrumptious Acadian dishes, shown below in a Prince Edward Island Acadian version, a baked hash brown with pork.  

In other parts of Acadia , chiard is more like a stew.  
And here’s another version from the menu of an Acadian restaurant: Chiard avec Viande et Légumes, “un copieux repas - avec haricots verts, salade de chou, petit pain, thé ou café.”

Disputed Etymology of Chiard

Some authorities ― those few who deign to speculate on the origins of French slang ― suggest that the prime meaning of chiard is ‘mess,’ and that it begins as a popular cradle word for a child, and stems from the vulgar French verb chier ‘to shit,’ ultimately from Latin cacare. Thus, chiard has the verbal stem chi- and adds the common French pejorative and agent suffix -ard, so that its literal meaning is ‘shitter,’ but in its use as a French nursery term, chiard is playfully applied and means ‘little shitter’ as an endearment to a child. In the slang of present-day France, chiard is still used this way. Related Québec words include chiasse ‘diarrhea’ and its verb chiasser ‘to have diarrhea.’

So, could chiard have once named a fecal-brown hash? Seems quite likely. The Petit Robert, a well-known French dictionary, states that chiard to describe a child is a coinage of the mid-20th century. That is completely mistaken. Historical records show the verb chier has been in French since the dawn of the thirteenth century (its first manuscript appearance 1202 CE) and, second, that chiard was coined hundreds of years before the mid-20th century, and carried by immigrants from northern France to the new world that became Québec as a humorous tag for a peasant hash.

The first printed appearance of chiard is as a French adjective in 1503 CE in the phrase peur chiard ‘an infantile fear.’

 

The Ka-ka Hits the Historical Fan

Indo-European Root *ka ‘bad’ ‘shit’

This etymon for defecation is widespread among the Indo-European languages. For example: kakkan Greek ‘to defecate,’ kakal′ Russian ‘to defecate,’ sákrt Sanskrit ‘dung pile,’ Old Irish caccaim ‘I shit,’ kakken, Dutch; kacken early modern German, kakke Danish, and the obsolete English verb ‘to cack.’

Proto-Indo-European may have borrowed the ancient root from a common Mediterranean source, for we find it spread about the ancient Near East. Compare the Hittite zakkar ‘excrement’ and the ancient Egyptian words chacha (hard, rough ch) ‘foully odorous excrement’ and kait ‘excrement.’ The terminal t in kait is merely the common Semitic marker for grammatical femininity, so there again lurks our root *kai, carved in painted hieroglyphs upon pharaonic ramparts.

 

Other Words from the IE *ka Root

Greek kakos – bad – reduplicative to stress the meaning, literally ‘bad-bad’, that is, really bad.

• Cacophony is an English derivative that means ‘bad or unpleasant sound.’

• Kakistocracy, a somewhat obscure political term, is now, in the obscene reign of American President Bush and his chief hatchet man, the vomitous creep Cheney, quite apt. Kakistos is the superlative of the Greek adjective kakos. Kakistocracy is rule by the worst persons possible.

• Copros is a Greek word for ‘dung’ or ‘shit’ showing the non-reduplicated reflex of the IE *ka root. English gets a few technical terms in science, medicine and psychiatry from this root:

I posit, although many etymologists would not, that the other common Greek word for shit ( skor, skatos ) also contains embedded within it the IE *ka etymon. That Greek word gives us modern English words like scatology and scatological (skatologia Greek, literally ‘writing about shit’). The English word scatology is a learned compound, apparently coined only at the end of the nineteenth century.

 

UTTER POPPYCOCK !

One of the most hidden uses of the IE *ka root is in our English word poppycock ‘nonsense.’ In a revised note dated December 2006, the Oxford English Dictionary has the latest word to say on the Dutch origin of poppycock:

“[App. < Dutch poppekak, lit. ‘doll's excrement’ (app. only in the phrase zo fijn als gemalen poppekak showing excessive religious zeal, lit. ‘as fine as powdered doll's excrement’ (not dated in dictionaries of Dutch)) < pop doll (see POPPETn.) + kak excrement (see CACKn. and adj.). Although the Dutch word is app. not attested in a sense comparable to the English one, it is possible that it may have been used regionally in such a sense.

Although the English word has freq. been considered a loan < a supposed Dutch *pappekak, freq. glossed as ‘excrement as soft as porridge’ , no such word appears to be attested in Dutch.]”

Copyright © Oxford University Press 2007.

 

Latin cacare – to defecate. Compare the English nursery word of excrementitious import ka-ka. Note that the Latin verb also shows reduplication of the Indo-European root (*ka) with the sense that feces is ‘really bad.’

A Roman latrina at Ephesus. Note that there were no stalls or partitions.

The Romans were communal defecators, chatting pleasantly with neighbours while at stool.

 

 

“School Days, School Days,

Dear Old Sociopathic Professor Days”

 

Should your dainty dandy's lips have curled in haughty disdain at anytime during this low discussion of fecal words, I close with a memory from a long-ago Latin lesson.

We were reading the impish and racy poet Catullus who refers to a rival's poetry as cacata carta. Remember, Catullan odes would have been written on parchment scrolls or paper. So I offered as a translation of cacata carta, one that preserved the alliterative naughtiness of Catullus’ Latin, “shitty sheets.”

Dr. Gnatkin, my Classics professor was a 300-pound etiolated southern gasbag and racist — he approved of Plato's approval of slavery! — who rose up on his one good leg and wet his lips with a sponge soaked in a beaker of medicinal Jack Daniels kept on his desk beside his Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary. Through flapping lips resembling a cup of exploded balloons, Gnatkin spewed at me, “No, Mr. Casselman. Muh fastidiousness and fine upbringing at Swaying Niggers, my ancestral plantation in Peckerwood County, Georgia, in short, my exquisitely tuned sensibilities prevent me from pronouncin' so vile a concatenation of fecality as you have uttered, suh! Let us instead settle for a more civilized and commodious rendering of cacata carta, namely “dunged-on paper.”

"Okay, Dr. Gnatkin," I said, “lest Jefferson Davis circumvolve in his sepulchre, and, even if all three of us — you, me and Catullus — know it is not animal dung to which the poet makes reference. And even if your translation is a ham-fisted, unpoetic clunker that drops upon the listening ear like a dead slave's iron manacle, even so, you are the learned teacher and I but a humble pupil toadying at your sandalled footsies, until such time as I can watch each of your toes blacken and drop off, you bloated bubba of rancid Georgia lard.”

Okay I only thought most of that. But — Hey! — I wish I'd said it. That counts too, doesn't it?

My loathing for that dead Lutheran bigot, bad Latinist and spiritual charlatan froths in and perfuses my gizzard even as I type this, hoping with all my atheist might that Gnatkin is in hell, kneeling on his one knee, performing a menial task like cleaning basketballs.

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