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Mother-in-law Joke, a la Québécoise Si la laideur était une brique, ma belle-mère serait la Grande Muraille de Chine. If ugliness were a brick, my mother-in-law would be the Great Wall of China.
2 Ta soeur est tellement grosse que sa taille de ceinture c'est Equateur. Your sister is so fat that her belt size is “Equator.”
3 Ta mère est tellement petite qu'on voit ses pieds sur la photo d'identité. Your mom is so short that, in her ID photo, you can see her feet. 4 Ma belle-mère est tellement conne que sur un formulaire ou il y avait écrit "Ne rien écrire sous cette ligne" elle a écrit “OK.” My mother-in-law is so stunned that when she’s filling out a form and it says “Do not write in this space,” she writes in “OK.”
5 Québec Halloween joke Le soir de l' halloween, un petit garçon se pointe chez moi en veston cravate. On Halloween night a little boy shows up at my door wearing a jacket and tie. I ask him what he’s dressed up as. He says he’s the tax collector and then he takes off with 46 percent of the candies without saying thanks.
6 BOONDOCKS 1.Traverse des bourgots. • This neat dismissal in Québec French describes a tiny community as “a place where moose-callers cross the road.” Bourgot is the object itself used to make a moose-like call. But here, in a rhetorical figure called metonymy, the meaning of the word itself is transferred from the object to the persons who use the object, in this case, moose-calls. The comic place name implies a location far out in the bush.
2. Paris du bois. • Translation: ‘Paris out in the woods somewhere.’ I heard this in Québec, referring satirically to a very small town in the region of la Beauce. 7 CANADIANA 1. Aussi Canadienne qu’une vache folle. ‘as Canadian as a mad cow’ • This was a Quebec saying that Canada ’s beef farmers did not want spread abroad, but it circulated widely in Quebec during 2004-2006.
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Ma petite ville Québécoise est tellement polluée qu’à tous les matins, le coq ne chante pas, il tousse! “My little Quebec town is so polluted, roosters don’t crow in the morning, they cough up phlegm.”
9 Lui là, y’est tellement gratteux qui parle du nez pour ne pas user son dentier. • “That guy is such a cheapskate, he speaks through his nose to save wear and tear on his false teeth.”
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How big are the mosquitoes in Quebec ? Au chalet de ma grand-mère, les maringouins sont tellement gros qu’ils doivent se mettre à genoux pour nous piquer dans le front! • “At my grandmother’s cottage, the mosquitoes are so big they have to get down on their knees to bite us in the forehead.”
© 2012 copyright william gordon casselman
French Canadian Translation Services
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