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1. Çé tsiguidou. Meaning “everything’s fine” or “A-okay,” this is real joual, le patois québécois pas mal vrai. Standard French might be “Tout va bien.” I think this might be a borrowing from the British but certainly not Canadian expression, “Tickety-boo.” That somewhat effete affirmative is used chiefly by older Brits to mean “everything is in order; all is well.” But if you are a Quebecker and know better, please send me an explanatory email detailing the origin of tsiguidou. 2. nid-de-poule nid d’autruche In Quebec’s playful slang, nid-de-poule means chicken’s nest, a little pothole in a roadway, while nid d’autruche means ostrich nest, a big pothole.
3. J’ai la langue à terre. I’m totally wiped out. Literally: my tongue is on the ground. It is also used to indicate extreme hunger.
4. Lâche pas la patate! Don’t wimp out! Don’t be a suck! Don’t give up! Literally: Don’t let go of the potato.
5. Je m’ai levé du pied gauche. I got up on the wrong side of the bed. Literally: I got up on my left foot. This is not exclusive to Quebec . It is continental French and is hundreds of years old.
6. Ostie! or ‘Stie! This is a nasty Quebec curse, probably not to be used by non-French-speaking visitors. It refers to the host, the Eucharistic bread used in the Roman Catholic mass. Why is it a curse word now in modern Quebec French? In the first several hundred years of Quebec ’s provincial history, the Roman Catholic Church gripped Quebec in a tight stranglehold. Priests were the little dictators of every village in the province, while in the larger towns and cities sleek, silk-clad bishops and sneering cardinals tiptoed noiselessly through the corridors of power abetting corruption, seeking illegal favours, and colluding in fraud, embezzlement, and suppression of the human rights of ordinary French Canadians. One of the ways the impoverished and then powerless people of Quebec could and did fight back was to make almost every technical Roman Catholic religious term a bitter curse in the language of the people. To this day these imprecations spoken aloud cause the priestlets to rage and spume. They do not wish to be reminded, nor to have the people remember, the depredations inflicted on Quebec by 400 years of abusive popery. If you know these religious terms in English, you will hear them in this list of powerful Quebec curses: Câliss! (chalice) Calvaire! ( Calvary ) Ciboire! (ciborium, a cup with an arched cover used to hold the Eucharist bread) Sacre bleu de Tabarnak! (the holy blue colour of a tabernacle, an ornamental box used to hold the elements of the Eucharist or used as a second container for the pyx, a box that stores consecrated bread.
7. Il a les cheveux tellement gras que son peigne fait du cholesterole. His hair is so greasy, his comb has high cholesterol.
8. Ma tante est tellement lente qu'elle s'est fait frappée par une auto stationnée. My aunt’s so slow, she was hit by a parked car.
9. La chaloupe ‘the rowboat’ In France it might be canot à rames ‘boatlet with oars.’ Or, if a small boat were a complete ruin, a Parisian would perhaps use the word barque. In European verbal history there appears to have been an insufficiency of boat words, and therefore European languages shamelessly borrowed their neighbours’ terms for different kinds of boats and shiplets. Chaloupe may look utterly foreign to modern English readers, but it would not have appeared so to literate Victorians who prized Tennyson’s poem The Lady of Shalott. Was her breath, I wondered as an inquiring child, redolent of onions? Miss Sniffly, a perfectly embalmed Victorian spinster and one of my worst English teachers, was not amused. The English form of the word is shallop. In English this obsolescent term referred to a little boat for shallow water used with oars or sail.
By the margin, willow-veil'd Slide the heavy barges trail'd By slow horses; and unhail'd The shallop flitteth silken-sail'd Skimming down to Camelot: But who hath seen her wave her hand? Or at the casement seen her stand? Or is she known in all the land, The Lady of Shalott? Alfred, Lord Tennyson (from The Lady of Shalott, 1842 version of the poem)
The English shallop appears to be a doublet ultimately from the Dutch boat word sloep, thus sloep would give two English boat words, sloop and shallop. There may have been borrowing from English into French to obtain the French form chaloupe. In any case, all the major European languages borrowed the word: Spanish has chalupa; Italian has scialuppa and German Schaluppe. Tennyson perhaps picked up use of the word as a poetic boat term from Edmund Spenser who used it in 1590 in The Faerie Queen “Into the same she leapt, and with the ore Did thrust the shallop from the floting strand.” After Tennyson, all manner of toodling Victorian pseudopoets and pseudopod-people took up the word shallop. It was so very au fait with all that was verbally chic. The nadir of its overuse is by Peter H. Emerson, the etiolated Norfolk naturalist who warbles in his wispy English Idyls (1889) “Fain would I have slumbered in my frail shallop.” Asleep at the oar again, eh, Peterkins? You naughty, naughty boy.
More Quebec Sayings
© 2006 William Gordon Casselman
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