For Sure (25 page)

“An' wot would you 'ave us do wid all dose
tche
and
dje
soundin' words in Chiac?
Tchequ'un, djerre, djeule,
an' so on
.
” Are we gonna start talkin' like dat, now?”

“We're already talkin' like dat.”

“Not all of us.”

. . .

. . .

“Well, oughtn't we all to talk de same way?”

Of course it would be wrong to assume that complementary relationships automatically exist within couples both of whom are eldest siblings. A good example is Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, although the latter was an only child rather than an elder sibling. Their union, though difficult in many respects, became increasingly complementary because of Franklin's paralysis due to poliomyelite, after which Eleanor, a very willing elder sibling, took on a more important role in her husband's career.

“Yer a writer, wot does you tink?”

“Dat would be a pinch . . . to decide once'n fer all wot our language is, wot's in and wot's out. Fer instance, would de old French words automatically be alright? An' any English words automatically bad? Some powerful smart folks would have to tink long an' hard on it, folks dat could make real sense of it all, and den explain it all so we could see the sense of it.”

“Explain it! Bin twenty-five years dey been explainin' how pollution's after killing de planet. Has folks changed? Not a whole lot. Not enough anyway.”

. . .

. . .

“Dey say, takes only one percent of folks to change der mind to change a trend.”

“I believes dat.”

“I do not.”

“No way.”

“I'm not sayin' everyting changes from one day to the next, but in de end tings change all de same.”

“Maybe so. If yer one percent of a whole lot of folks, like one percent of a million… how much is dat? A hundred tousand?”

“Ten tousand.”

“No more'n ten tousand?”

. . .

“Alright, well, maybe not den . . .”

Queen Victoria reigned over Great Britain and Ireland from 1837 to 1901, marrying her cousin Albert of Saxe-Cobourg in 1840. Albert was granted the title of Prince Consort in 1857, but died four years later, leaving Victoria unconsolable and indifferent to the affairs of the realm. She only renewed her interest in governing 15 years later, when she became Empress of India.

“Wid me, it's de ones dat tries to talk Chiac just to be ridiculin' us. Dey're tinkin' it's easy to talk like dat, but when dey tries, dey finds out it's not so simple as dey tawt.”

“An' isn't it always de same example they comes up wid:
crõssér
la street.
”

“Dat an'
back
. . . like to say dey'r goin' back to de store:
je vas retourner bãck au magasin
.”

“You knows it! Right der, it proves dat talkin' Chiac is harder dan it looks. A fellow talkin' real Chiac wouldn't be puttin'
bãck
and
re-
in de same sentence. Ee'd say ‘
y vas bãck y aller
,' period. De
back
replaces de
re-
, right? Ee wouldn't even say
‘y vas y aller bãck.'
On account of
bãck
, just like
re-
as a matter of fact, goes before de verb. Dat's just plain common sense.
‘Je vas bãck aller au magasin.'
Or some might say ‘
store'
instead of ‘
magasin'
.”

“A body has to grow up wid it, it's not sometin' you can learn in a book, or
pickér
up just like dat.”

“You gots to know yer English, if yer gonna be
mêler
ç
a
wid yer French.”

“
Absolument
!”

Exhausted from summersaulting through so many grammatical avatars, the computer spellcheck surrenders, announcing it has abandoned its task.

“Who can tell me wot dey makes vodka wid?”

Apparently no one had ever thought about it. One person in the group took a stab at it:

“Well, it's gotta be sometin' dey've got plenty of in Russia.”

“Yer on de right track.”

“Oatmeal!”

“Nope . . .”

No one had any other ideas.

“Alright den, you doesn't know. Shall I tell ya?”

The table wasn't exactly dying to solve the mystery.

“Potatoes.”

“Potatoes?”

“Is dat a farce or wot?”

Complicity? Between who and whom? Acadians and anglophones? Acadians and proper French speakers? Acadians and history? Acadians and the environment? Complicity marked by laziness? Ignorance? Self-sufficiency? Negligence? Or, on the contrary, by wisdom, a homeostatic response to the vagueries of history and the environment. Complicity marked by balance? Serenity?

The party in honour of Hektor Haché-Haché was in full swing.

“Matter o' fact, dose
patates
comes from South America, Bolivia, an
Perou
. De Spanish were de ones wot brought dem over to Europe.”

“I tot was corn dat came from South America.”

“Fer sure. Corn, as well . . .”

At that moment Terry came in.

“Hey, Terry! Come on o'er 'ere boy and tell Pomme to stop tellin' us all kinds of stuff we doesn't want to know.”

“Speak fer yerself!”

“'Twas Parmentier — de one dey named de dish
potage Parmentier
after — who showed de French you could eat it, an' you wouldn't catch leprosy. So den, King Louis XVI decided to call 'em
pommes de terre
, on account of dat was prettier dan
patates
. Marketing, I suppose.”

“An wot was dey called up until den?”

“
Batate,
or
batata
, in Spanish.”

“Geez, are you fellows practicin' fer
Jeopardy
or wot?

On the other hand, a certain number of authors are included in both ideal libraries, but for different titles. Among these are Theodor Adorno, Maurice Agulhon, Louis Althusser, Philippe Ariès, Sylvain Auroux, Émile Benveniste, R. Boudon, Albert Camus, Ernst Cassirer, Roger Chartier, Robert Darnton, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, George Devereux, Olivier Duhamel, Umberto Eco, Mircea Eliade, Moses I. Finley, François Furet, Marcel Granet, Friedrich von Hayek, Martin Heidegger, Eric J. Hobsbawn, Roman Jakobson, Carl Gustav Jung, Ernst H. Kantorowicz, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Le Goff, Emmanuel Lévinas, Bronislaw Malinowski, Marcel Mauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edgar Morin, Erwin Panofsky, Michelle Perrot, Jean Piaget, Geza Roheim, Jean-Paul Sartre, Martine Segalen, Michel Serres, Leo Strauss, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Arnold Toynbee, Paul Valéry, Arnold Van Gennep, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Paul Veyne, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and Max Weber. Looking at both lists, we can say that these authors are cited for at least 2 works, but some are recommended for even more. From Sartre, for example,
La Bibliothèque idéale
recommends 7 titles, while “La Bibliothèque idéale des sciences humaines” recommends three different texts, so that all together 10 books by Sartre are listed. This process of extrapolation leads us to the conclusion that a hundred authors, men and women, have all together written 250 works judged to be of great value, if not absolutely essential to a rudimentary knowledge of the social sciences.

“Well, I'll tell ya, she gets on me nerves, she does, wid all her useless details. First of all, who does she tink she is? An
deuxièmement
, who cares!

In her novel
1953: Chronicle of a Birth Foretold
, France Daigle does not mention the publication in French that year of
Éros et Civilisation
by Herbert Marcuse, one of the leading thinkers of the '60s generation. She does not regret the omission because, contrary to what is written in
La Bibliothèque idéale
, the book was actually published in 1954 and not in 1953.

Terry was listening carefully. It was the first time he'd spoken with a psychologist in the flesh — a woman psychologist, in fact, and very pretty to boot. Her name was Myriam, and she dropped in at the Babar from time to time, for a drink with her friends after their evening volleyball game.

“They've also found that the father plays an important role in the development of a child's language and intelligence. Because he will tend to use more technical terms, for instance . . . let me think . . . he'll ask for the electrical wire stripping or crimping pliers, or the combination pliers, or the needle-nose pliers, instead of just asking for the pliers.”

Terry thought he'd better start improving his technical vocabulary in French. He was also wondering how come this girl — woman? — knew so much about pliers.

“Also, fathers tend to make children reformulate sentences or repeat what they asked for. This forces the child to improve his or her language, because more often than not, mothers understand their children's half-phrases, which doesn't help the children learn to explain themselves.

“Hmm . . . I never tawt o' that.”

“Even at play. Not that mothers do a bad job at it, but fathers tend to encourage their children, to challenge them, set goals, tease them, let them find solutions themselves instead of solving the problem for them. That way, the child becomes more creative, more resourceful.”

Terry found that Myriam used all the right words.

“An', it's now been shown that the affective relationship between father and child can be as strong as that between mother and child. If the father is truly involved, the child will seek comfort from him just as often as from the mother.

“Geez . . . Well I'm sure glad I ran into you. Would you like anudder beer?”

The Canadian philosopher, sociologist and essayist Herbert Marshall McLuhan (who — by coincidence? — follows Marcuse in the alphabetical order of the select list) gained an international reputation for his work entitled
Understanding Media
, one of the key arguments of which — that we are unaware of the medium's effect on us — is entirely consistent with Marcuse's thinking.

“Dad, what does sexy mean?”

“Sexy? Means you tink a girl's cute, in a way dat excites you inside.”

. . .

“Like in a way dat you want to get up close and hug her, have fun talkin' and laughin' and kissin' her.”

“Like Mum?”

“Fer sure. When I met 'er, yer mudder was de most sexy girl in town.”

“No, I mean like Mum now!”

The expression
battre son plein
has two possible meanings, according to whether the word
son
is used as a noun or as a possessive adjective. If
son
refers to a sound, the expression denotes a maximum of loud and continuous noise such as might occur during a national holiday celebration, as in “the noise was deafening.” If the word
son
acts as a possessive adjective modifying the noun
plein
, the expression refers rather to an action that is being accomplished with maximum strength, as in “the celebration was in full swing.” This latter meaning is the one preferred by the
Petit Robert
dictionary. In either case, the expression connotes a high degree of intensity.

“I'm tellin' you, boy, when you've as many personalities as I've got, yer not a person any longer, yer a whole sect!”

“Hahaha!”

The Catholic Church forbade marriage between first cousins, that is two people having a grandfather or grandmother in common. This once removed relation implicates uncles and aunts on the one hand, and nieces and nephews on the other. The Church went so far as to forbid marriages between men and women with a familial link three times or four times removed, excluding, for example the marriage of a great-nephew with the great-great-granddaughter of a common ancestor. The rule of consanguinity also excluded marriage between a 50-year old woman, let us say, with the grandson of her first cousin. From the eighth to the twelfth century, the Church even banned marriage between persons related five, six, or even seven times removed. These interdictions diminished when it became common practice for nobles to invoke them in contesting marriages running counter to their interests.

“Wot're youse sayin'?”

“I'm sayin' de Americans stole America from us, and de Québécois sleeveened our
poutine
. Doesn't bodder you all dat dey took de word
poutine
to make sometin' dat's nuttin' like ours, de real
poutine?
”

“Don't dey 'ave a
poutine chomeur
den?”

“Naw, dat's der bread pudding, doh dey says it in de masculine,
un pudding chômeur.
”