Some Modest Suggestions for the Improvement of Canadian Bilingualism

I think it's splendid to live in a country with two official languages. At risk of having my citizenship application rejected, however, it seems to me there are a number of ways in which the enforcement of bilingualism in everyday life both wastes our time and, more importantly, forces us to witness abuses (of both languages, but most often of French) that ought to make any lover of language moan. 

It is taken for granted in Canada that everything 'important' ought to be said twice, in order to accommodate the two official ethnolinguistic constituencies. Many of us understand both versions, and are made to sit through two different rounds of exactly the same speech, exactly the same set of instructions given over an automated hotline, exactly the same --to speak with Francis Bacon-- Idiotismes. This policy fails to accommodate those of us, however, who tend not to think that what is being said is important to begin with, and have enough trouble sitting through the first iteration of some unctuous speech at some meaningless awards ceremony, or listening to the first run-through of the inherently regrettable reminder before a classical concert that all electronic devices should be switched off. I find myself wishing I didn't understand either language, and wondering how anyone could possibly feel publicly gratified or validated by hearing the platitudes of modern life spoken in the language he or she associates with home and hearth.

Far better would it be to agree that only one language be spoken --pick a language, I don't care which-- and then expect that everyone rise to the task of understanding it. For the most part, even if they are unable to rise to the task, they will not be missing much. I have sat through awards ceremonies conducted entirely in Turkish, I note, and do not feel that I was terribly disadvantaged, notwithstanding my general cluelessness at the time as to the rules for the generation of syntactic compounds through agglutination. Language, I never tire of saying, is a paper-thin wrapping around a much vaster and more complex (and evolutionally more deeply engrained) social reality made up primarily of gestures, expressions, and other bodily motions that do not centrally involve the tongue and the larynx.

But this indictment is a small one in relation to the scandal of product packaging in Canada. Not so long ago I saw, in the window of a Dollarama (which deserves a separate indictment, by the way), something that was labelled as a Halloween Big Daddy Kit, containing a fake gold chain with a dollar-sign pendant, a few fake gold caps for the teeth, and various other signifiers of membership in African-American urban culture. Offensive as the thought of a latter-day blackface routine is, even more offensive to my mind is the supposedly French translation that the Chinese company that manufactured this junk for some reason bothered to slap onto the packaging: Kit de 'Big Daddy' de Halloween.

This, I think, is something that never should have been written by anyone, something simply too stupid to be seen as speaking to the laudable demand for recognition of any ethnolinguistic community. It's not just that every word but the two prepositions is Anglo-Saxon in origin (one a recent borrowing; two others part of a presumedly untranslatable phrase that gets placed in scare quotes; and, finally, one left in English even though a perfectly adequate French equivalent, trousse, is readily available). It is rather that the pseudo-French rendering of the phrase reveals how completely unworthy of being said the original English was. If the French were permitted to play precisely this role and no other, that is, the role of destroying the pretensions of the English, then it would be welcome. But we are expected to take both seriously, and both as perfectly equivalent mirror images of one another, conveying a perfectly legitimate idea. 

But junk capitalism is in general so stupid, and what it asks us to believe so utterly devoid of real meaning, that it's simply misguided to suppose that we are being spoken to at all by the words on the products that it asks us to buy. The supposition that obligatory bilingual packaging could satisfy a community's demand for recognition could only be maintained by someone who does not really cherish language to begin with, but simply sees it as a blunt tool of political maneuvering. Let the Chinese spew out their junk in English (for now; eventually it will all be in Chinese alone, and all of these debates about the recognition of communities will seem thoroughly quaint), and let what's worth being said be said in French. This would be a just division of linguistic tasks, and one that would not at all compromise Canada's status as a bilingual country. Many countries and regions, in fact, from Luxembourg to Kazakhstan, permit just this sort of distinction of roles for different social purposes, and they do not seem to be handicapped by this.

In fact they seem, if I may be frank, rather more elegant. I'm tired of seeing signs that tell me I'm on the 'Campus Sir George Williams Campus', or at the 'Centre Eaton Centre', or that I'm eating 'Tomato Ketchup aux Tomates' (every time I see this last redudancy I think: Well of course I am. You just said that!). These are phrases in no known language. They speak to no community at all.

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For more great photos of packaging Perronisms, go here.

Comments

[The Worst of Perth]

C'mon. "Kit de 'Big Daddy' de Halloween." is vastly superior. Even from as far away as Western Australia, it immediately brings to mind a vision of a New Orleans Big Daddy, where the gilded smile would surely contain a soupcon more savoire faire than the other surely monolingual daddy.

Your Humble Servant

[Cameron Brown]

"It is rather that the pseudo-French rendering of the phrase reveals how completely unworthy of being said the original English was."

Peter Sellars achieves a similar effect as Inspector Clouseau.
Pepé le Pew, too.

[Faze]

Gold caps, gold jewelry and gold chains are not modern-day "blackface". They simply refer to a subculture, many of whose followers are of African descent. There's nothing wrong with mocking or paying backhanded tribute to a subculture. Offensive "blackface" imitates physical characteristics over which the real-life possessors have no control -- like skin color, hair texture, or facial features. To suggest that the grotesqueries of hip hop culture are somehow so typical of people of African descent that to draw attention to them is the equivalent of drawing attention to dark colored skin, is pretty offensive in itself.

[Justin Smith]

Faze, At risk of setting off an infinite regress of offense, I'm going to stick by what I said. In addition I recommend Stanley Crouch on the survival of minstrelsy in hip-hop culture. I don't entirely agree with him, but I do think it's pretty implausible to say that hip-hop, unlike minstrel shows, is not coded black by default, no matter what the actual ancestry of those involved in it is. Anyway even when dressing up like someone else is clearly meant honorifically (e.g., 'redface' or dressing as a Native American) it is still likely to offend. So one should be all the more wary, I think, when the dressing up is not motivated by a desire to honor, but rather by a desire to parody in the spirit of carnival. Why the New Orleans 'Indians' do not offend anyone (for now anyway) is another, complex question.

[The Worst of Perth]

May I die before having to witness the spectacle of Pepe Le Pew being forced to speak French

[DC]

For yet more hours of giggly orthoschadenfreude, see http://www.protegez-vous.ca/chronique-hein.html

[P C]

"Kit de 'Big Daddy' de Halloween".

That's perfectly written in Spanglish. I'm Serious.