Sousveillance: A Word Coined by a Canadian at Bill Casselman's Canadian Word of the Day

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What is sousveillance? It’s related to the word surveillance. Sousveillance is the digital mode by which millions of people around the world were able to watch in recent horror as Royal Canadian Mounted Police goons tasered to death Robert Dziekanski, an innocent, sick, Polish tourist in one of the most vomitous acts of incompetence in the not-very-noble history of Canadian policing.

The word sousveillance was coined about the year 2000 by Steve Mann, a professor of computer engineerring at the University of Toronto.

The keys to this newish word are two French prepositions often used as noun prefixes. These prepositions are sur ‘over,’ ‘above’ or ‘on’ from Latin super and sous ‘under.’

When your high-school French teacher told you that sous derived from the Latin preposition sub, she was wrong. If modern French sous descends from Latin sub, where did the terminal /s/ in sous come from? Just snuck in the back door, did it? Sous comes from Roman soldiers’ Latin as spoken in ancient Gaul. In military Street Latin under was subtus. In classical Latin subtus was an adverb of place. But it did double duty as a preposition when it replaced sub in spoken Latin. Centuries later, as Latin evolved into the various Romance languages, subtus became in French sous, in Old Spanish soto, in modern Italian sotto. If you say something quietly in Italian, ‘under the voice’ so-to-speak, you say it sotto voce. English has borrowed the term to describe speaking in an undertone or a subdued pitch.

“Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres”

‘All Gaul is divided into three parts’

is the famous opening line of

Julius Caesar’s The War in Gaul.

Getting Surly

After the Norman conquest in England in 1066 CE, dozens of words prefixed with sur- entered English from French. A surcharge ( from Old French surcharger 1429 CE ) is, in its prime meaning, an ‘over’ charge from any regular fare or tariff.

Below are other French sur+ words, their date of first appearance in English print and their first meaning in English:

Surfeit Old French surfait 1300CE ― excessive amount

Surmount Old French surmonter 1369 CE ― to rise over, to surpass, to go beyond

Surname Anglo-French surnom 1330 CE ― name added to a person’s common name

Survey Anglo-French surveier 1467 CE > medieval Latin superviare ― its first meaning was to check the legal status of a property about to be sold

Survive Anglo-French survivre 1473 CE > late Latin supervivere

―to live after the death of another

Surface 17th century French science word 1611 CE

―The original meaning was the exterior boundary of an object

Surpass surpasser 1588 CE

Surrender began as an Anglo-Norman legal term surrendre, in English print by 1466 CE, whose chief meaning was to give up land to a lord by conveyance or relinquishment.

SO SOUS ME !

Sur’s relative sous (French ‘under’) generally appears in English only in borrowed French words which retain their French spellings and, in lucky cases, their French pronunciation.

Sous-chef is a kitchen cook subordinate to the chef.

Sous-ministre is an assistant in a department of French government led by a minister.

Sous-préfecture

Readers of police novels by George Simenon may recognize the sous-préfecture, the mini-cop-shop, the smaller neighbourhood French police station.

Sous Vide

This is a recondite technical term from French cookery. Sous vide is a method of preservation that involves pasteurizing food and storing it chilled in vacuum-packed bags or containers.

Typical French musette ensemble

“Sous le Ciel de Paris”

Or you may know sous in the title of a very familiar French song, “Under Paris Skies,” a hit in 1951 for Yves Montand and a few years later for Edith Piaf. The accordion chords of this ditty were once played by every little tourist quartet in Paris and almost always en musette. These musette bands used to play in open-air guinguettes, little country cafés where couples could dance to the music en plein air. Visitors to France tell me such cafés are nowadays hard to find. In Middle French musette referred to a small, bagpipe-like instrument shown above, later in French history replaced by the accordeon, in present French accordéon. A bal musette is a small dance hall with an accordion band.

1930s French sheet music for a musette-waltz entitled “Stars of the Dance Hall.”

Soutane

The French sous is partially reduced in the name of a priest’s frock, the soutane, from medieval Latin subtana. The soutane or cassock, sometimes made of lace, is worn under the ceremonial vestments of a priest during the celebration of Mass.

Sousveillance / Surveillance

Surveillance was a most popular word and action in Victorian English prisons. The 19th century saw this noun’s first wide use in English. It’s the noun from French surveiller = sur ‘over’ + veiller ‘to watch’ from Latin vigilare ‘to keep watch.’

When Steve Mann coined sousveillance, he was thinking about a term to describe unofficial forms of watching, such as recording a robbery with your cellphone camera or videotaping cops beating a black person to death with truncheons . In other words, sousveillance consists of ordinary citizens keeping recorded track of officials, instead of the other way around.

A Wikipedia definition, a paraphrase of Steve Mann’s ideas, states that “surveillance denotes the eye-in-the-sky watching from above, whereas sousveillance denotes bringing the camera or other means of observation down to human level, either physically (mounting cameras on people rather than on buildings), or hierarchically (ordinary people doing the watching, rather than higher authorities or architectures doing the watching).”

“Hey, Sergeant Preston, it’s a Munchkin in an Electric Wheelchair!

Can I Taser Him, Serge? Eh? Aww, pretty please. ”

Could such sousveillance, literally ‘underwatching’ bring about a new era of police accountability? Might we, in Canada especially, be able to weed out and dismiss from service (?) the sadists and bullying nutbars among our police who wish to continue their merry Taser spree across our once friendly but now stunned dominion? Let us hope so.

But remember, hope puts blisters on your ass. Action circulates your blood and gets things done. Pick up the phone and tell Stephen Harper’s cop-loving and police-coddling government to ban the Taser and either to reform or to abolish the defective Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Tasered twice by gung-ho RCMP thugs, Roberet Dziekanski, innocent Polish visitor to Canada, lies dead at Vancouver International Airport.

Did you hear? The Mounties are changing their motto —

from “We always get our man”

to “We always chicken-fry our man.”

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