The Tragically Unhip

While English is my mother tongue, I also speak fluent French and Italian. My personal rule for how to qualify as fluent in another language is whether or not you can go on a date with a native speaker of said language and actually communicate using words—rather than just by playing footsie under the table. I suppose you could say that I speak “textbook” French and Italian, meaning that regional dialects are often lost on me, despite my being half-Neapolitan (where they speak like slurring drunks who forgot half their syllables) and being born and raised in la belle province (where they speak the kind of French that sounds like it just fell off the back of a truck).

The two moving men currently emptying out my apartment just so happen to be pure laine québécois who speak joual, so I am having a very hard time communicating with them. Pure laine is what some francophones from Quebec like to call themselves to state that they have pure, undiluted French blood and that they can trace their lineage all the way back to the original settlers who sailed over from France in the 1600’s. No miscegenation with these folk! (That is, of course, if they selectively ignore their history of intermarrying with the English, Irish, and Mohawk—to name only the most common—but I digress.) And le joual is a French dialect that loosely translates to “impossible to be understood by anyone from outside of this province.” Maybe now you’re starting to understand how confusing this can get.

Anywho, my movers just tried to explain to me that the teak desk that they were moving has a huge chip in the back, and they wanted to alert me to the fact that it was already there and not done by their hands. They informed me, “C’est lousse, ça. C’est pété.” I stared at them blankly and answered, “What?! Those are not even real words!” They got flustered, then translated into “proper” French, “C’est brisé.” Since brisé means “broken”, I was able to deduce that lousse comes from the English word “loose”, while pété literally means “farted”, which I took in this context to mean “busted.” So the movers were trying to tell me that my desk is busted, which I knew already. Thanks, fellas.

I think AngryFrenchGuy really hit the nail on the head when he wrote about how difficult it is to be “pure” anything in Quebec. If you would like to learn more about the hilarity that goes on in my province, I recommend reading his post here, and you might also want to watch this video of the quintessential québécois stereotype, played by actor Yvon Barrette in the movie Slap Shot (not to be confused with Justin Timberlake’s horrific impersonation of a French Canadian in The Love Guru—that was just bad).