Dép & Guichet: Two Words in Québec English & The Origin of ‘A Sticky Wicket ’
Anglophones living in Québec naturally have vocabulary items borrowed and adapted from Québec French. These words and phrases are common within the city limits of Montréal, where most Québec anglophones live. Dep Wine & Dépanneur Dep wine is low-price, poor-quality wine sold in convenience stores in Québec. In Ontario and other provinces of Canada cheap wine might be called rotgut, gut-rot, Dago Red or Thunderbird. Do you know any synonyms for cheap wine used in your natal province? Please email them to me. My email is given at the end of this column. Canadians with an immediate British background may call cheap wine plonk, those fresh from France vin de table.
The word stems from a continental French use of the 20th-century verb dépanner ‘to help out temporarily,’ ‘to tide over.’ The sense adopted in In France the word dépanneur has different meanings, chiefly ‘mechanic’ or ‘repairman ’ either at a garage or an automotive mechanic willing to go out on the highway and fix car breakdowns by the side of the road. Le dépannage is ‘helping someone out.’
Guichet = ATM The Québec word for automatic bank machine is widely used by English-speaking Montrealers, even though the American-made machines are all stamped “ATM” for automatic teller machine. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Example of word use from Montréal newspaper, La Presse, 1996 « Le père n’est pas seulement un guichet automatique. » “A dad isn’t just some automatic teller machine.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ATM in France Everyday Parisian street slang calls an ATM un distrib, short for distributeur. The French acronym for ATM is DAB for distributeur automatique de billets d'argent. But the more formal business phrase for ATM = le guichet automatique.
Guichet in France has these common meanings also: ticket booth, ticket desk, wicket, box office, turnstile or entrance gate. Guichet Gives English the Word Wicket Guichet is the source of our English word wicket. The word was one of the earliest borrowings from Norman French into English after the Norman Conquest of 1066 CE. During that same 12th century, the word, spelled wicat, came into English from Old North French viquet (cf. Walloon wichet). Guichet is the modern French spelling. Wicket’s first meaning in English was a small gate or door. The Normans were, of course, the Northmen, that is, Vikings who raided, pillaged and then settled in northern France. Thus it is natural that some Viking roots linger in Norman French words. It appears that viquet may descend from an Old Norse verb like vikja ‘to move, turn, recede,’ itself related to an Old Norse adjective veikr ‘weak, not strong.’ One might posit that a little gate or entrance in a long fence was a place where, to a Viking mentality, the fence was weak, a little weak, viquet. Just a guess, Ragnar, you brutal nitpicker!
I Say, Old Bean, Bit of a Sticky One, What? The wicket in cricket comes also from guichet French ‘little gate.’ A cricket wicket looks like a little gate: the 3 stumps (sticks) in the ground and the two little bails on top, at which the bowler aims. The earliest use of the word to denominate a cricket wicket is 1733 CE.
Sticky Wicket A lovely, older British colloquialism for ‘a dicey situation’ or ‘an endeavour fraught with various difficulties is ‘a sticky wicket.’ The fuller phrase from a cricket match is ‘to bat on a sticky wicket.’ It meant you might have batted well, but the bails stuck to the top of the wicket and made scoring a trifle tricky.
© 2009 William Gordon Casselman
Any comments, emendations, additional word lore? Please email it to me at canadiansayings@mountaincable.net
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The Dep is a common phrase in Quebec English and stems from the Québec French word for a corner store: dépanneur. In Ontario, it would be a corner store, a Mac’s Milk or a 7-11; in the deep south of the USA, a Piggly-Wiggly.
Québec just before the First World War is that the dépanneur, the little convenience store, will tide the shopper over for a day or a weekend, before the shopper visits a much larger store. It helps out the shopper by staying open later at night than larger ‘downtown’ stores and being open on Sundays and other days when larger stores used to be closed.
