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Tuque: Origin of the Word
I begin with a fave Québécoise saying:
Attache ta tuque!
translation: Get ready (for heavy action)! Fasten your seat belt! Let 'er rip!
• Put 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 Toronto 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 tuque?
The now defunct Canadian Oxford Dictionary insisted 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.
copyright © 2012 William Gordon Casselman
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