Not so fast, Pete M.

Your legion of former fan (note use of singular) demand an explanation… where’ve you been, anyway: Gitmo? Deep undercover in “Wingnutopolis, in the great state of Wingnuttia”? Or perhaps you’re in witness protection and are now blogging under the assumed identity of “Gavin” M.?

Inquiring mind wants to know.

glenstone

PS And Gavin M., if you really are a real person, if Pete M.’s excuse for his absence is good enough, I vote that he be allowed to co-write the climactic Amber Pawlik sex scene.

Working title “Mazola party in Amber’s kitchen”.

Good call casting Widmark as the lead. I can definitely see him starting out as the confident, straightlaced, righteous guy from Judgment at Nuremberg, and slowly disintegrating into Tommy Udo from Kiss of Death. Prolonged exposure to wingnuts will do that to you.

tabarnac

Don’t be so vulgar.

*ahem*…taboire.

Mal de mer,
LOL !
I haven’t read the whole series, but I have yet to see the private dick swear like a Quebecois should, prompting my unsanitized “sacre”. You figure that a true “bleuet” facing the reality of wingnuttia would let loose more Catholic sacrament words than those found in a Holiday Catholic Mass.

Ben criss. Seb est le Canadien. J’ai seulement dit que le d?tective ?tait Quebecois pour le g?ner.

Y a-t-il un bon dictionnaire de Quebecois sur les Internets?

LOL !
RE: dictionaire quebecois.
Quick google for “joual” finds this great site.

http://www.notam02.no/~hcholm/altlang/ht/Quebecois.html

This other site in French tries to explain some of the general differences between French and Quebecois and has a good section on sacres.

http://membres.lycos.fr/seynav/joual.html

Personellement, j’aimerais bien que le detective dise:

Crisse d’ostie de ciboire de viarge, je crisse mon camp d’icitte. Y sont fous, ses romains.

Note the Asterix reference…

Bien not?. That’s ‘y’ for ‘ils?’ It’s tricky to look at.

Heh. Seb ne sait pas qu’il n’ya pas le seul personne ici qui peut comprendre le fran?ais… The irony is that English is his second language, although you’d never know it.

How does this scan?

Maybe it wasn’t my business, but I was getting tired of Justin Darr lolling on that barstool talking up a storm, like he knew something. Plus, I was a little drunk. “Hey Chumpy,” I said. “Fermes la chiotte! Va chier dans les fleurs!”

Vas chier?

Hmm.

You’re quite right,
“y” is for “ils”, it’s another one of those joual things.

Your French is quite impressive, btw. I can’t do accents in the comments for some reason. But I’ll just copy and paste from yours.

Amend the line for:

“Hey Chumpy,” I said. “Fermes ta gueule! Arr?te d’?coeurer tout le monde”.

gueule= mouth of an animal
Fermes ta gueule= shut your trap.

?coeurer= to severely annoy (literally, to make vomit)

As for the “va” “vas” conjugation conundrum.

The first refers to the enjoinder (imp?ratif):
Va chier, mon ostie.

The second to the statement of fact:
Tu vas chier quand tu peux.

But honestly, I’m a biochemist, not a writer. And your story is doing great without me trying to be a dick about cultural accuracy.

love your blog.
peace,
ch2.

I love this:
calisse de crisse de tabarnak d’ostie de ciboire de testament.

but I can’t find out what “ciboire” means. While we’re on the subject, y’know.

ciboire is the (usually golden) cup in which consecrated wafers are put.

My French is labored; it takes a lot longer to form a sentence than I could get away with if I tried to speak the language.

You can get diacriticals and other characters in HTML with special tags that start with ‘&’ and end with a semicolon. è is an ampersand, then ‘egrave,’ then a semicolon. é is ampersand, ‘eacute,’ and semicolon.¹

¹ There are also numerical codes — superscript ‘1’ is ampersand, pound sign, 185, semicolon.

I don’t speak joual. I spend all my days wandering around the Outaouais (pronouced ‘ootaweh’) area insisting people say “je vais”.

Needless to say, no one likes me. Pis y peuvent s’en chrisser.

Oh, and by the way, it just goes to show that Patriotboy at Jesus’ General is right. The French are traitors. In fact, the French word for traitor…traiteur means ‘caterer’. Equating disloyalty to one’s glorious homeland with the simple exercise of proferring cheese balls.

…makes ya think, don’t it?

Mal de mer,
LOL ! Your comment using the traiteur-traîteur equivocation was hilarious. And don’t you know that joual is royal French that failed to get changed by those uncouth revolutionary peasants. It IS the proper way to speak… So drop “je vais” and practice your “j’va”.

Gavin, thanks for the html tip. And yes, writing French is far more time consuming than speaking. One day, they’ll finally get rid of most of the ridiculous grammar rules that clarify nothing but just complicate the writing.

Duh,
that should read “traiteur-tra?tre equivocation”.

Just went to the Amber Pawlik column you linked to, and couldn’t help noting a particularly risible “unclear on the concept”:
“When I was at Penn State University, a feminist group through (sic) a ?Cuntfest,? in which a lesbian stripper exposed her breasts on stage.”