Dion & Dionne: Origin of Canadian Surnames at Bill Casselman's Canadian Word of the Day at www.billcasselman.com

Canadian French Words /Québec Sayings / Québec Words

Céline Dion 1968–

The popular Québec singer’s hits include “If You Asked Me To” and her duet with Peabo Bryson “Beauty and the Beast,” as well as “ Love Can Move Mountains,” and “Des mots qui sonnent.” At the end of the nineties, she recorded one of her biggest hit singles and a truly phenomenal best-seller, “My Heart Will Go On,” featured prominently as the love theme in James Cameron’s megahit movie “Titanic.” Dion has become a song queen of Las Vegas and a mother who retreats from showbiz now and then to raise her family.

Just last week some 200,000 digital supporters of Democrat Hilary Clinton, United States Presidential candidate, voted by internet to select Hilary’s campaign song. They chose Céline Dion's “You and I.”

Hon. Stéphane Dion 1956–

He was a weedy political science professor at the University of Montréal, appointed to Chrétien’s cabinet in January 1996 as intergovernmental affairs minister to deal with national unity policies, an astounding portfolio to bestow upon an arrogant Quebecker who never once in an intellectual life stooped to learn reasonable English. As the final mildewed droplet of Paul Martin’s power in the Liberal Party at last evaporated during the federal Liberal leadership convention, Dion’s forces won, beating far more electable candidates like Michael Ignatieff.

Suddenly, in front of shell-shocked Liberal troops, there stood le petit Stéphane, the unelectable, disdainful, English-garbling, prissy Quebec egghead, now leader of the Liberal opposition.

In the annals of tongue-swallowing murder of a language, Dion stands out as a man who can misplace the stress on every English word he utters that is longer than one syllable.

Now such persistent linguistic contempt takes years to perfect, years of concerted dismissal of the importance of a country's other official language.

Yes, les maudits anglais have neglected to learn Canadian French for centuries. But, I would add, unilingual Quebeckers are not asking to be voted in as Prime Minister of Canada. Well, one of them is.

Before some pure laine habitant tries to machine-gun me, let me answer: Yes, my French beats the squeaky spume from purse-mouth's English.

Dion's lack of English fluency is an issue, an outer token of a deep, inner, even if unexpressed and unadmitted dispisement. Don't you dare ask for my vote as Prime Minister of Canada if you can't even pretend to have tried to master the language of this country's majority!

Are we talking rocket science here? No. We are talking 8 weeks of pronunciation instruction in a language lab. Simply enroll Stéphane Dion in an accent modification class for two months, lessen his profound ignorance of English sound patterns and teach Narrow-Lips to enunciate proper English.

But apparently Dion will submit to no such corrective course.

Eh bien! Fue-toi mille fois, mon petit gar-fish. Blame no other if your plan to lead this country becomes ben fucké.

If ever a chief personified the death wish of a political party and its self-destructive impracticality, it is Stéphane Dion.

By the way, I am no Tory. I am a pissed-off leftie, weary of watching the Canadian left pull the trigger pins on grenades they have gaily attached to their own belts. Suicide bombers? Every ball-dropping one of them!

The Dionne Quintuplets

Born on May 28, 1934, near the Ontario village of Corbeil, the five Dionne sisters were the first “quints” to survive infancy. One birth in 57 million gives identical quintuplets. The five girls were exploited by almost everyone they encountered, including, of course, politicians. Below, possessive as Beelzebub with a new sin, is Mitchell Hepburn, Premier of Ontario from 1934 to 1942. No, Mitch, you did not father them.

Dion as a French surname has two sources.

DION & DIONNE AS TOPONYMS

The ancestor may have lived in one of the half-dozen ancient French towns with names like Dion, Dions, Les Dyons, Dionne: all of them from early French divonus, from the Celtic word for god *devos, indicating that the locality boasted a small shrine to a deity or some other religious importance.

The Dionne quintuplets’ surname has this origin, too. Many French surnames originate when the family’s founding ancestor adds the name of his village to his given name. Thus in the 13th and 14th centuries when French surnames arose, we could imagine a small village where seven men bore the baptismal name, Pierre, named after Saint Peter. One of these men was born in another village just down the road from our imaginary village. That distant village was Dion. So, when Pierre finally had a bit of land to leave his sons, for the purpose of clear identification in his last will, he became Pierre Dion. This is a pattern that produced thousands of French surnames.

DION AS GIVEN NAME

Dion may also be a surname based on the ancient baptismal name Dido, Didonis —not from the name of Aeneas’s gal pal, the Queen of Carthage, but rather a Latinized form of the Germanic name Thiodo, Diod ‘people.’ The loss of the intervocalic d in Didonis to produce Dion indicates the word was borrowed at a very early date into French.