ONE of the formative experiences of my youth was being taught how to paddle a four-man racing canoe during summer visits to my French-speaking cousins at their cottage north of Quebec City. To keep in sync, paddlers would sing. And the favourite song of my male cousins, which I would roar with great gusto while not understanding a word, started like this: “En hiver, calvaire! Ça glisse, calisse!” Only much later did I realize these lines, which translate as: “In winter, Calvary! It's slippery, Chalice!” were not to be repeated in front of adults, as both calvaire and calisse were swear words in Quebec.
I thought of that song recently when I heard about an exhibition at the Musée des religions du monde (Museum of World Religions) in Nicolet near Montreal called Tabarnak: l'expo qui jure (Tabernacle: The exposition that curses), which traces the history of using religious objects as swear-words in the French-speaking province. The theory is that it was a form of rebelling against the Roman Catholic church, whose clergy were a dominant force in the lives of Quebeckers, providing health, social services and education, until they handed these powers over to the state following the social upheaval of the 1960s. To casually utter tabarnak, calisse, or the even more popular ostie (host) was a way to thumb your nose at the powers that be.
As theories go, it makes sense. Showing disrespect for something—a prerequisite for certain forms of swearing—only works if the expectation of respect is there to begin with. Quebeckers were highly religious. The government estimates that 85% of the population attended weekly Roman Catholic religious services in the mid-1960s. However, like many western societies, Quebeckers have become increasingly secular, with that attendance figure now hovering around 15%. At the little wooden church in the woods near my cousins' cottage, if you wanted to sit down for mass on a summer Sunday prior to the 1960s, you had to reserve your pew in advance. Attendance has fallen so sharply that the church was deconsecrated in 1995 and now is used as an art gallery. One motivation behind the museum exhibit on swear words was to show visiting school children the objects they were referring to when they swore, as many had no idea what a chalice, tabernacle or ciborium (ciboire) looked like. They would recognize hosts, but only because these communion wafers are now sold as snacks in Quebec grocery stores.
The exhibit may also mark the passing of an age. With the Roman Catholic church much less of a presence in the daily lives of Quebeckers, the religious words are losing their punch. Swear words disappear not through censorship, but when they no longer offend, according to the exhibit. The tamer ones—esprit (spirit), sacrament and baptême (baptism)—have already disappeared from daily discourse, it notes, and the others may soon follow. Olivier Bauer, a professor in Université de Montréal's faculty of theology and author of "L'hostie, une passion québécoise", believes even the impact of ostie, once the most popular swear word in Quebec, is weakening.
When profanity no longer serves, there is always obscenity to fall back on. My stepdaughter, who was born and raised in Montreal says her twenty-something friends increasingly use a mix of English and French, such as calisse de bitch. If the Quebec language police get wind of this, they will likely try to discourage it on grounds that it is a further deterioration of the French language. Perhaps they'll take comfort that outside of cosmopolitan Montreal, the old words are still very much in vogue. My cousin, the former paddler who now teaches at a secondary school in Valcartier, near Quebec City, says he has not noticed any major changes yet. I forgot to ask him whether he has taught his students the paddling song.