For Sure Read online

  247.7.8

  Useful Details

  In Acadian, words ending in o-i-r are more often pronounced “ouère” or “ware” rather than “oué” or “way.” The word miroir, for example, is occasionally pronounced as “miroué” or “meerway,” but more often “mirouère” or “meerware.” In this context, the w (double u) could easily replace the sound “ou.” Many Acadian pronunciations follow neither the spelling nor the sound dictated by what is commonly referred to as standard French.

  “At first, when I read mirwère, I ’ad no clue wot dey was talkin’ about.”

  248.30.3

  Chiac

  249.3.11

  Statistics

  One last inference deduced from the pourpre.com site: the 13 first letters of the French alphabet introduce into language an army of colours twice as large as the entire second half of the alphabet, that is 189 versus 92.

  “Are you one of dose dat read all de Scrabble words, den?”

  “Are you daft?”

  250.31.1

  Questions with Answers

  leeks and parsley cleave

  the furrows of November

  winter marches nie

  251.55.2

  Haikus

  As he munched on his cookies, Le Grand Étienne eventually found himself thinking about something other than colours. He was imagining what it might have been like for him to have a child. He thought of it as he’d never thought of it before. In other words, he was thinking about it as though he were thinking about a new colour, a new texture.

  252.14.9

  Zablonski

  Of Lacan’s works, La Bibliothèque idéale suggests Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (The Seminar – Book XI).

  253.46.1

  La Bibliothèque idéale

  “Fer example, we might be sayin’ sometin’ like de pot’s found its cover.”

  “I remembers me mudder sayin’ sometin’ like dat.”

  “Well, some folks even say dat different. Over in France, dey says ‘to each his cover,’ wot’s pretty close to the same ting.”

  “I suppose, only seems to me dat would be more like de cover on a mason jar.”

  “Dat’s wot I sees, as well.”

  Terry had given up on using the standard French word couvercle for cover when he was talking with Zed and Pomme, even though he sometimes used it in front of the children.

  “Well, in Turkey, dey says like de pot, like de cover, wot sounds mighty close to like fawder like son, right?”

  Zed and Pomme were waiting for what Terry would come up with next.

  “Den, der’s de Arabs, dey says that every beard has its comb.”

  “Hahaha!”

  “An’ de Greeks, dey says that de pot finds its cover when she’s rolling, wot conjures up de dish ran away wit de spoon.”

  . . .

  . . .

  “I ain’t boring youse, am I? ”

  254.100.2

  Proverbs

  Two simple equations illustrate the flexibility and constance of the number 12:

  a)

  12 × 12 × 12

  =

  1,728

  (1 + 2) × (1 + 2) × (1 + 2)

  =

  1 + 7 + 2 + 8

  (3) × (3) × (3)

  =

  (1 + 7) + 2 + 8

  {(3) × (3)} × (3)

  =

  {(8) + 2} + 8

  9 × (3)

  =

  10 + 8

  27

  =

  (1 + 0) + 8

  2 + 7

  =

  (1) + 8

  9

  =

  9

  b)

  12 × 144

  =

  1,728

  (1 + 2) × (1 + 4) + 4

  =

  1 + 7 + 2 + 8

  (3) × {(5) + 4}

  =

  (1 + 7) + 2 + 8

  3 × 9

  =

  {(8) + 2} + 8

  27

  =

  10 + 8

  (2 + 7)

  =

  (1 + 0) + 8

  9

  =

  1 + 8

  9

  =

  9

  255.72.4

  Equations

  Inevitably, as they went to and fro among the customers, the waitresses and waiters picked up snippets of conversation they could not resist sharing with their colleagues. This complicity was part of the social benefits of the Babar.

  “He didn’t!”

  “I swears to God!”

  “Poor ting!”

  “I’m tellin’ you, she looked like she’d been hauled troo a knot hole . . .”

  “Well, I’m goin’ straight home after work and warn me boyfriend right der, if ever ee’s a mind to ditch me, ee better not be doin’ it in a bar.”

  256.6.10

  The Babar

  Letters as we know them are essentially what remains of figurative lines that survived the images that were rejected, forgotten or repressed. Whereas words — groupings of letters — recover, silence, dissimulate what we humans are incapable of admitting.

  257.90.1

  Letters

  Browsing La Bibliothèque idéale took Élizabeth’s breath away. Where did this strange and marvellous upheaval she felt come from? How did these signs laid down across the page manage to implode the void and explode everything around her?

  258.24.4

  Élizabeth

  To pay her way through school and to provide for her child, a young mother had come up with the idea of tinkering with a cigarette making machine to produce a short filtered cigarette. She sold these discretely in restaurants and bars, in packages of six for two dollars, the way other women sold roses. At that price, smokers were quick to snap them up, others bought them as local artisanal products, souvenirs, oddities, or to eventually offer them as gifts.

  259.19.10

  Interesting Details

  “Ask me, I’d say Acadians have got some Belgian roots.”

  “An’ how’s dat den?”

  In among all the music to which Ludmilla had introduced Terry, there were a few songs by the Belgian chansonnier Jacques Brel.

  “Dat song where he says ‘je veux qu’on rit, je veux qu’on chante, je veux qu’on s’amuse comme des fous, je veux qu’on rit, je veux qu’on danse quand c’est qu’on m’mettra dans le trou . . . — I want laughter, I want singing, I want us all to have a ball, I want laughter, I want dancing when’s de time dey puts me in the ground.’ Fer sure, dat’s Acadian.”

  “So more it was! Fer sure we’s always up fer a party.”

  Terry added:

  “Sure, dat too, only I’s really talkin’ ’bout de bit: ‘quand c’est qu’on
m’mettra dans le trou — when’s de time dey puts me in de ground.’ On account of, Acadians say: Quand c’est que tu t’en vas? — When’s de time yer off den? When’s de time yer plannin’ to pay me de money you owes me? When’s de time youse two is gettin’ hitched? Anybody round dese parts might be sayin’ dat.”

  Ludmilla added:

  “That interrogative form still exists in Belgium.”

  Interrogative? Terry had not considered this aspect of the form’s usage. He tried but failed to come up with an Acadian example of the affirmative form of “When’s de time.” He was momentarily stymied, but then:

  “Well, ’tain’t only in questions, now is it. A body might say sometin’ like “de referee calls a penalty when’s de time dem players is liftin’ der sticks too high.”

  It took a bit of explaining, but Ludmilla finally got it. Terry added:

  “Carmen’d kill me sure if I’d said dat in front of Étienne an’ Marianne, by de way.”

  . . .

  “Jus’ goes to show how deep I’ve got de Chiac in me.”

  260.30.12

  Chiac

  Modern aesthetic, aesthetic of modernity. Pictural revolution. Surprising innovation. Fundamental concepts. Art theory, artists’ mentality. Colours, forms, symbols: authorial identity. Proportions. A world in turmoil. Perspective, sense of space. Perceptible forms. Magnificent. Visual order, plastic language. Savage. Evolution of ideas and styles. Sumptuous. Skittish but Herculean. Key moments in the history of art. Impressionism: epic adventure. Through and through. Critical. Evolution of taste. Systematic. Metamorphosis of printing and publishing. Splendid artistic and scientific surveys. Meeting of the writers and artists. Parallels. Deviations. Margins. Museums. Stylistic signature. Close links between the social and the visual. Tumultuous. Stupifying. Geometric theory of art. The photographer and the painter. Visual problems of history. Industrial archaeology. Science, contemplation, emblematic work. Major exhibitions. Society that engenders. Art of calligraphy. Masks, sculptures, and ritual objects. Decorator and urbanist. Patient research. Classical. Baroque. The Grotto. Verve. Regarding the influence of the physical environment and climate. Baroque and classicism. Current affairs. Modern figure. Art brut. Art merchant. Great. Greats. Captivating. Unparalleled. Lesson in wonderment. Future function. Immense crowds jostling. The painter of the wheat field. Drama earth garden. Nuance. Light of the sky.

  261.24.5

  Élizabeth

  “An den der’s de saying in English: de pot wot calls de kettle black. In French, we says: le chaudron qui se moque du poêle. In English dat would be more like: de pot dat laughs at de pan.”

  “Only you mean la poêle, which is a pan; le poêle, dat’s a stove.”

  ?

  “Me granny says, le chaudron manchure la poêle.”

  “Manchure?”

  “Must come from amanchure — de pot handles de pan.”

  “Only amanchure’s not right neider.”

  “Dat’s how we says it in Acadia. De pot handles de pan.”

  “I suppose you could say le poêle instead of la poêle: Le chaudron amanche le poêle, an’ dat would mean de pan handles the stove, an’ dat would make sense as well.”

  262.100.3

  Proverbs

  In total, 1,873 authors, for the most part men, are responsible for the 2,401 works in La Bibliothèque idéale. While the selection often includes several books by the same author, other books have several authors. Still others are anonymous or the fruit of too many authors to be named individually. The latter works can be ancient — the Sanskrit epic The Mahabharata, for example — or absolutely contemporary, like Paris-Berlin, the catalogue of an exhibition at the Centre Georges-Pompidou.

  263.46.4

  La Bibliothèque idéale

  “Ah? On peuwe fioumaïye ici?”

  An Anglophone from Moncton who had begun to fraternize with the francophones at the Babar seemed to want to know if smoking was permitted.

  “Dey don’t mind a couple a’ puffs now an’ den, so long as folks control demselves and dey don’t make a fuss about it. Bottom line: up to da smokers to be smart about it.”

  “C’èye . . . hõw dõ yõu sãy fãir en françaïye?”

  “Raisonnable.”

  “Raïye-zônable.”

  “Well, lots of folks just say fãir.”

  264.18.7

  A Place for Everyone

  “Oui. Je saïye.”

  The rituals of obsessive neurosis are such that Freud compares this pathology to a “private religion.”

  265.58.1

  Extensions

  Élizabeth could not explain her attraction to the fine arts, an attraction that included even the words and expressions they engendered. As though art managed to infiltrate even the jargon of art.

  266.24.6

  Élizabeth

  Convincing equation based on the number 7:

  7 + 7 + 7

  =

  21

  (7 + 7) + 7

  =

  2 + 1

  (14) + 7

  =

  3

  (1 + 4) + 7

  =

  3

  (5) + 7

  =

  3

  12

  =

  3

  1 + 2

  =

  3

  3

  =

  3

  267.72.5

  Equations

  “Tell me, Étienne, have you a godfather?”

  Le Petit Étienne looked up uncomprehending at Zablonski.

  “Do you know what a godfather is?”

  The boy did not appear to know.

  “A godfather — or godmother — is someone who takes care of you in a special way when you’re a child. It can be an uncle, or a friend of your parents. In any case, it’s normally someone your parents like.”

  “Zed?”

  “Zed is your godfather?”

  Étienne could not confirm this.

  “And usually, with a godfather you also have a godmother. Have you a godmother?”

  Étienne did not know.

  “Maybe, Granny Thibodeau . . .”

  268.14.10

  Zablonski

  Materials: plain weave fabric (the same number of lateral threads in the weft as longitudinal threads in the warp), in natural or combined natural and synthetic fibres. The higher the gauge, the more threads there are per square centimetre. Aida cloth, perforated paper, Hardanger fabric, Aida cloth strip, terrytowel with Aida band. Perforated paper is ideal for greeting cards and Christmas tree decorations because it requires no hem.

  269.71.4

  Intro Embroidery

  “An den der’s ‘Beauty is in de eye of de beholder.’ I swear I don’t know if dat means wotever you tink is beautiful is beautiful, or if it means de fellow or girl who sees sometin’ beautiful is beautiful.”

  . . .

  . . .

  “Run dat by me again?”

  270.100.6

  Proverbs

  Examination for Inferential Statistics course IV (STAT 4773): the Montpellier Scrabble Club’s web site informs us that the Scrabble® game is part of the plot or appears as a prop in 52 films. 52 is also the number of weeks i
n a year, and twice the number of letters in the Latin alphabet. If we divide 52 into 144 (one of the numbers on which Acadian author France Daigle’s novel For Sure is based) we obtain the following result: 144 ÷ 52 = 2.769230. From the above, draw the maximum inferences, taking into account the intervals of confidence, the Latin squares and the degree of freedom.

  271.32.1

  Exam Questions

  Zed asked:

  “Wot about ‘De straw in de eye of de shaman’?”

  “Don’t you mean ‘The straw on de back of de camel’? Like they says: ‘De straw wot broke de camel’s back.’”

  Pomme jumped in:

  “I likes dat one, I do. I can see it wonderful clear.”

  “Dat’s where dey gets de sayin: ‘Awright, dat’s de last straw . . .’”

  “Neat!”

  “In French, we’s supposed to say: ‘De drop that made de vase overflow.’”

  “G’wan wid ya! No way!”

  Pomme’s incredulity made Terry laugh.

  “Are you sayin’ dat, in French, we’ve got no straw on de back of a camel?”

  Pomme seemed truly offended. Terry tried to assuage him:

  “Well, de water in de vase is pretty much de same idea . . .”

  But Pomme was adamant:

  “Say wot you like, de straw on de camel’s back is a whole lot prettier.”

  272.100.5

  Proverbs

  New and telling equation based on the number 7:

  7 × 7 × 7

  =

  343

  (7 × 7) × 7

  =

  3 + 4 + 3

  (49) × 7