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1.
Attache ta tuque!
Get ready (for heavy action)! Fasten your seat belt!
• Pin your tuque on your head because things are going to get crazy.
Origin of tuque
Over the centuries many preposterous hats have been offered as solutions to the problem of keeping Canadian noggins cozy in winter. None suits this Canuck better than the tuque, a knitted wool cap invented by anonymous European sailors who pulled large socks over their foreheads to keep warm at sea ― at least so goes one tale about the genesis of tuque.
The lowly tuque (or toque) has survived being tasselled, bobbed, debobbed, plastered with commercial logos of NHL hockey teams, and tarted up in fluorescent glow-in-the-dark colours. Buck-toothed yokels don tuques. So do moguls buffaloing down Bay Street through blizzards.
The word tuque is Québécois French, a slight variant of toque which in France meant a cap that knocked (toquer) against the back of the neck or shoulders because it had a long, droopy end. The French word and a similar Italian word, tocca ‘cap’, were imported from Spain in the fifteenth century (Spanish toca) to describe a pageboy haircut actually worn by pages.
Some dictionaries state that the Spanish toca is of unknown origin. I don’t agree. Tocar in Spanish means ‘to touch.’ The pageboy bangs hung down and touched the shoulders, like the end of the sock cap, the ‘touch’ cap, la toca, our tuque, that came along a little later. In Spain la toca also named a female hair style, a high female head-dress and a large kerchief worn at the back of the head that ‘touched’ (tocar) the lady’s shoulders.
Toque not toque?
The Canadian Oxford Dictionary insists that toque is the common English Canadian spelling. I suggest that this form has been almost totally replaced since the 1980s by the French Canadian spelling. I see chiefly tuque in print in Canadian newspapers and Canadian sports stories. The COD also offers this bizarre and unsupported etymology: “ultimately from a pre-Romance form like tukka ‘gourd, hill.’ Wheeeeeeee! Let’s riffle through all the dictionaries and madly grab at anything remotely similar. Of course, I haven’t personally spoken to any pre-Romantics…lately.
The snuggly headgear even appears on the map of Canada. La Tuque in Québec received its name from a riverbank cliff that resembles tuques worn by early fur trappers.
2.
Ç’pâs des farces.
That’s not funny!
• This is a Québec expression used when the speaker feels that undue humour or lightness of tone, undue levity, has been applied to a situation that is ‘no joking matter.’
3.
Ça va mal à shoppe.
It’s all messed up.
• This Québec answer to ‘how’s it going?” means that things are getting screwed up, that all has not gone according to plan.
4.
En tsitsi.
A whole bunch. A lot. Plenty.
• If everything is going well, you might hear this in Québec, “Ça roule en tsitsi.”
An idiomatic Canadian English translation might be, “It’s just rolling along singing a song.”
5.
avoir l’air mais pas la chanson
Literally: to know the tune but not the song
• Hence: to be aware of part of a procedure but not all of it
6.
Un vrai Bleuet!
• A person born and bred along the Saguenay River or in the Lac-Saint-Jean area of Québec. The region is famous for its succulent blueberries (bleuets).
7.
Décrisse de là!
Piss off! Get the hell out of here!
• Décrisser is a Québec verb of anticlerical provenance. Crisse is joual for Christ. Sacrilegious humour in la belle province is a reaction to the hundreds of years during which the Roman Catholic church held the entire province in a pious strangehold. Most obscenity in Québec French involves the misuse of religious terms associated with Roman Catholic mass.
Crisse is a frequent expletive and is used imaginatively in nouns, verbs, adjectives, and even as vulgar infixes. For example, déconcrisser ‘to destroy.’
Un décrissant is a newish, neat Quebecism for ‘a real downer.’ Something that depresses the hell out of one.
Quel décrissant! ‘what a bummer!’
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8.
Vraiment fucké
Completely screwed up
• An obvious borrowing from the dread English taboo verb, this adjective is used in all manner of colorful phrases that, believe it or not, are not as obscene in Québec as they are in English. Bien entendu, one would certainly not use them in conversation with one’s Aunt Mary.
A few are:
fucké au boutte ‘totally fucked up’
fucké ben raide ‘‘properly screwed every which way’
fucké dans la tête ‘screwed in the head’ (some English Canadians might say ‘scrambled eggs for brains.’)
Et c’est tout maintenant, mes chers élèves.
© 2007 William Gordon Casselman
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