I went to No Frills where I bought five bags of grapes, a pack of raspberries, a pack of blueberries, a sack of potatoes, a pack of five-year-old cheddar, a pack of ground beef, a bag of kettle chips, a jug of orange juice, and two containers of skyr.
I weighed 84.4 kilos at 15:00.
I had a late lunch at 16:30. I had saltines with seven-year-old cheddar and a glass of lemonade.
I took a short bike ride to Bloor and Dovercourt, then south and home along Queen.
I weighed 84.5 kilos at 17:45.
I went over my essay and made a few small changes, then I uploaded it at around 18:30.
Here it is:
Code Bondage: How Chiac dominates the structure and meaning of English verbs
you are fools to speak French ... you are fools to speak English - Leonard Cohen
The dialect of Chiac allows into its vocabulary many elements of the dominant English language, but then takes control of those words by transforming them structurally and contextually into locutions unique to Chiac. These reconstructions of English words have evolved and continue to do so from the organic process of spontaneously repeated speech in everyday conversations between Acadians of southeastern New Brunswick, Canada. The ease of quotidian interplay that has resulted in this new language with new English words is sometimes simulated in Acadian literature in the form of communication between fictional characters, such as in the adventures of Acadieman as written by cartoonist and author Daniel LeBlanc.
Three of LeBlanc's comic strips from his Acadieman website (with the Chiac text translated by me), will give examples of English borrowings that have been transformed by this Acadian vernacular. Each humorous interaction also offers a metaphor for how Chiac stands in relation to the dominant French and English languages that surround it. The first, "La piscine" (The Swimming Pool), illustrates that to create new words from English is to elevate them but it also comes along with accusations of corrupting the purity of the French language with anglicisms. The second cartoon, "La peur" (The Fear), demonstrates an English verb being altered with French conjugation and also mocks the fear of the widening of the use of English-based verbs in the Chiac vocabulary. The third strip, "La skirt" (The Skirt) shows the French conjugation of another English verb and how its meaning becomes slightly changed in Chiac. The story in the cartoon also testifies to the power that a spoken language has to evoke a reaction, especially when the meanings of the borrowed English words are modified to convey a somewhat more vulgar nuance.
I will conclude by analyzing the unconscious power play that is revealed in Chiac's alterations of English words. In converting English verbs that invade the Acadian consciousness from outside, the Chiac speaker is symbolically dominating the dominant language.
In the Acadieman cartoon strip "La piscine" (The Swimming Pool) by Daniel LeBlanc, Acadieman is told at a public swimming pool that he has to stop urinating in the pool. His surprised response is that everyone pisses in the pool. But he is told, "Yes, but not off the diving board (LeBlanc)." "Pissing in the pool" is a metaphor for using English in French, which every Francophone does to some degree, but mostly with English nouns such as "weekend". However, unlike most forms of Franglais, the Acadian vernacular of Chiac goes deeper than the usual code-switching. It also threads English verbs into the structure of French grammar and conjugates them as if they were French verbs. This can be understood as urinating off the diving board because it splashes and mixes English into the pool of French from an elevation. It raises both French and English to a new language that is neither. When an English word like "walk" is used as "walker", "walké", or "walkont" it is no longer merely a visitor in French but has taken up residence in the language and been made into an element of a creole.
In the first panel of an Acadieman cartoon entitled "La peur" (The Fear), Acadieman's friend Coquille talks in French about the common occurrence of the fear of heights. Then in the second panel, we see Acadieman squatting in front of Coquille's open refrigerator with the crack of his wide buttocks shown to the viewer above his pants, and saying to Coquille, "As-tu d'la "grub"? Chu starvé. (LeBlanc) ", meaning "You got any grub? I'm starving." The English verb "to starve" is conjugated here as if it were a French verb. In the punchline, Coquille tells the viewer in French that what he is afraid of is widths. This has a double meaning, the most obvious being that the widths feared by Coquille are those of the wide buttocks of moochers like Acadieman, which are getting wider from eating his food. But the deeper sense is that Acadieman is feeding from a fridge full of Anglicisms. His incorporation of such words into the verb structure of French is feared to be widening the English influence on the dialect of Chiac.
In the first panel of a strip entitled "La skirt", Acadieman calls to a strange woman on the street, "Hey mademoiselle, j'aime ta skirt. J'aime la way qu'a hang (LeBlanc)." This translates as, "Hey miss, I like your skirt. I like the way it hangs." The English verb "hang" is changed here into something that is uniquely Chiac. In English one would not say, "I like the way it hang" because in the third person singular present tense there is always an "s" at the end of a verb. "Hang" in this case is treated like a French verb, most of which would not end with an "s" in the third person present tense, and even if it did, the "s" would not be pronounced. Also, the meaning of the English verb "hang" is changed here into a synonym for "fit", which has become common in Chiac but is rare in English.
In panel two, in response to the words he spoke in panel one, Acadieman is hit hard in the face by a swung purse. In panel three he is on his back and in pain, as he says, "J'ai notice que rien que j'ai jamais dit m'a ever fait mal", which translates as, "I notice that nothing I ever say ever hurts me." Again, there is one meaning of this cartoon on the basic level and another as a metaphor about Chiac. Acadieman has committed what is considered to be a faux pas in approaching a strange woman on the street and singling out her appearance as the subject of initial communication, and he is punished for that. But in the Chiac-related metaphor, Acadieman is being punished by a Francophone purist for speaking a language that is promiscuous with English. He tells us that what he says does not hurt him because Chiac is harmless among its speakers. But it is also a careless and natural speech that does not worry about the propriety or grammatical correctness.
Acadieman is an irreverent representative of a vernacular that has a punk sensibility or rebelliousness that comes from being a language of the young. A creole formed from casual speech between consumers of media who live on the threshold between the French and English worlds cannot help but be somewhat irreverent. Acadieman is a superhero because he fearlessly or carelessly speaks Chiac. His vernacular is relaxed and one might even say that it is as lazy as Acadieman, because it is developed while spoken and while letting go of grammatical propriety.
The irreverent romance between French and English in Chiac can be analogized with a dominant-submissive variation on the story of Romeo and Juliet. French and English are two families in conflict while the speech of the children of both clans comes together in a forbidden romance. Taking this interaction beyond code-switching, in conjugating English verbs with the kinbaku of French inflections, Chiac engages in code-bondage between French and English. In altering and fashioning words into a vocabulary that does not exist in English or French, Chiac effectively takes the language that is on top and puts it on the bottom in the neighbourhood setting. Thus English verbs are dominated and branded by the lashing tongue of Chiac, which is also a surfboard that is punting freely while barrelled by the waves of language that flow from the two solitudes of French and English.
Because it is constantly changing, Chiac is not going away. It can be argued that Chiac is corrupting French, and that claim can be countered with the debate that Chiac is saving French because without it the youth of southeastern Acadia would be speaking English. But perhaps neither is true. If Chiac is a new language it bears no responsibility whatsoever towards either French or English.
Work Cited
LeBlanc, Daniel Omer (Dano). “Acadieman.” Acadieman.com, Productions Mudworld, 2011, https://acadieman.com/les-bd.
I made four ground beef patties and grilled them in the oven. I had one on toasted Bavarian sandwich bread with ketchup, barbecue sauce, mustard, salsa, and sliced dill pickle. I had my burger with a beer while watching episode 22 of The Beverly Hillbillies.
Jed asks Granny for some spring tonic for him and his dog Duke because they are feeling low in spirits. Granny says that what both of them need is female companionship. Meanwhile, Mrs. Drysdale is preparing to mate her poodle Claude with a poodle from Paris named Colette. Colette's owner, Mademoiselle Denise stops at the Clampett mansion looking for the Drysdale residence. While Jed is showing Denise the way to the Drysdales, Duke and Colette run off together. Denise drives away, not realizing that Colette is not in the car. Later she comes back for her and she gives Jed kisses on the cheek in gratitude for taking care of her. After that Jed shaves and puts on hair tonic and it's not even Sunday. At the Drysdale's Mrs. Drysdale has turned her husband's den into a bridal suite for the dogs but the dog that shows up is Duke. Denise drives Duke back to Jed and gives him more cheek kisses. Then she goes back to the Drysdale's but before the "wedding" ceremony can commence, Colette hears Duke howling next door and jumps out the window to run to him. Jed shines his shoes, puts on a 19th Century suit and a bowler hat, and says he's going to take both Colette and Duke back to the Drysdales so Colette and Denise can decide who they want to be with.
Denise was played by Narda Onyx, who was a child actor in 1944 in Estonia when she and her family took to the sea to escape the Russians. They were picked up by a German boat and since they spoke German the sailors thought they were German. They were taken to Danzig and from there they went to Bonn which the Allies had already occupied. They applied for refugee status and went to Sweden and then England where Narda began to act again. She moved to Canada where she acted on many Canadian TV shows before moving to the US. She played Gretl Braun in Hitler and Maria Frankenstein in Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter. She wrote a biography of Johnny Weismuller called "Water, World, and Weismuller".
I didn't find any bedbugs for the second night in a row.
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