Peut-être

So I posted the following video elsewhere--You know for the LOLz-- after having been introduced to the English version and feeling Canadian, Québécois enough to warrant posting la version française. Comme ça:



Which elicited the comment from an American poster: La version [sic] Quebecoise [sic], peut-etre? Which seems thematic of my experience with Americans regarding Québec French: there always seems to be the implication that Québec French is somehow inauthentic. Flawed. Less correct. Now language legitimacy, purity and correctness are complex, spiky, issues particularly among the French (there are two formal language academies, which frequently disagree). Which leads me to the following question:

Mes chers amis américains, s'il vous plaît quelqu'un pourrait expliquer le problème que vous avez avec le Québec français? SRSLY. Quel est l'intérêt? What's up with that, yo?

It seems to me, whenever I am in the US or speaking French with my American colleagues, friends and acquaintances, this issue is brought up. Sometimes in jest. Sometimes sincerely. One even argued for the position because "they don't even use the liason phonetique in Québec." I of course objected strenuously because that is demonstrably untrue.

Is this just the vanity of American intellectuals, aping Parisienne arrogance?

With regards to the video itself, it purports to be from "The Republic of Bacon" ("La République du Bacon"), which apparently has two official languages, neither of which makes sense to have a regional designation, other than the already present ambiguity of French and English being both adjectives for ethnicity/nationality and language.

W o t W: 猪头 Zhu tou "Pig head" (S,P)

The Word of the Week is:

"豬頭" (traditional characters; 猪头 simplified characters; in pinyin: Zhūtóu; in English "Pig head") in Mandarin is a commonly used insult.

Although not an expletive per se it does have a similar sense to the usage of the English word "bastard" which is frequently used between friends but is not remotely appropriate with non-intimates or one's employer.

My dearest friend, Hung Pei-hsin, referred to me almost exclusively as 大豬頭, or Big Pig Head.

For more fun with Mandarin expletives and slang go here for a list of transliterated and translated Mandarin expletives. I also tried here (Insultmonger/Swearsaurus) but the link seems to be dead. However, I also highly recommend the English Wikipedia page here or here for 中文 (Zhōngwén) (the Chinese language article). (Nous adorons aussi les sacres québécois d'ici, bien sûr! En anglais d'ici.)

(There's also this blog post which ends with a good list with the simplified characters and translations and (with a scroll over) transliterations into pinyin...but the context of the list is a rather puerile absolutist Free Speech RAWKS! screed. Just scroll down or don't bother with it. More expressions, although not necessarily expletives are listed here on a webpage detailing the Chinese used in the film Serenity and the programme Firefly. Kinda fun, but with nerdiness and citations.)

謝謝 (谢谢)