posted December 12, 2006 10:19 PM              

But church-related expletives spoken in French not accepted on TV

Dec. 12, 2006. 05:55 AM
SEAN GORDON
QUEBEC BUREAU CHIEF

MONTREAL - In English Canada it is among the baddest of the bad words, a wash-your-mouth-out-with-soap, four-letter epithet considered unsuitable for polite company, never mind broadcast.

And yet, it is heard almost daily on Quebec's f-bomb friendly airwaves, where French-speaking hosts — and their guests — cheerfully throw the word around as a colourful alternative to "heck."

The 1.6 million viewers of Tout le monde en parle, Radio-Canada's top-rated Sunday evening television talk show, are routinely treated to the planet's most popular monosyllabic Anglo-Saxon curse.

High-profile newspaper columnist Richard Martineau recently used the expletive on the show — coupled with its popular companion "off" — in his war of words with novelist Dany Laferrière (who had called Martineau an intellectual midget.)

This past weekend, the comedian and satirist Christopher Hall casually deployed the two-word form of "go forth and multiply" on Ouvert le Samedi, a popular Radio-Canada public affairs program.

"You have to look at the context. It's universally understood to mean `oh, darn' ... it's used as an exclamation, like `wow,'" said Hall, whose outburst prompted giggles and minor tut-tutting from the program's host.

But Hall said while he can get away with stevedore language in English, it would be a different matter if he swore in French.

"There would be official complaints, and you'd be out of there ... saying `tabernacle' on the air would be like saying the f-word to your grandmother," said Hall, who regularly appears on both radio and television in Quebec.

Private talk radio and television shows adopt a similarly laissez-faire view of one of the English language's most powerful taboo words.

And yet the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission's broadcast regulations state no broadcaster shall permit "obscene or profane language."

But that phrasing contains a key loophole: is the f-word obscene to francophone ears?

"No, it doesn't mean anything," said ethnographer Jean-Pierre Pichette, who's written on the subject and compiled a dictionary of French-Canadian swear words and expressions.

If anything, the francophone ear typically mistakes the oath for "phoque," which is the French word for seal.

But Pichette said use of the expletive goes beyond linguistic incomprehension — those steeped in the French-Canadian swearing tradition typically use bad words as a new form of punctuation.

"Swearing has become trivial now ... it's seen as a way to assert credibility and force, it's a popular intensifier of arguments," said Pichette, a professor at Université Sainte-Anne in Nova Scotia.

Whereas French Canadians have a long and distinguished history of using church-related swear words, the traditions in English Canada mirror the well-established scatological and sexual roots of most anglophone expletives.

That explains why eyebrows are seldom raised when words like "tabernacle" — or its phonetic form "tabarnak" — are uttered by French-speakers on English broadcasts.

Such words, and others like "calice" or chalice, and "ciboire" or ciborium, are still considered moderately scandalous in Quebec. Indeed, the Radio-Canada ombudsman has received several complaints about inappropriate language on its shows.

The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council is the body that accepts complaints from the public and can forward them to the CRTC, which has the power to levy fines and other punishments. According to the most recent figures, complaints about offensive language have fallen steadily in the past two or three years.

Communication policy expert Pierre Trudel, a law professor at Université de Montreal, said the CRTC has moved away from "decency" in favour of the more elastic and subjective criteria of "obscenity."

"That means individual remarks are interpreted in the context of the audience, of society's tolerance for them," he said. Earlier this year, the Montreal Catholic Archdiocese made headlines with an ad campaign that featured massive posters emblazoned with swear words like "calice" and "tabernacle" and their dictionary definitions. It was an attempt to both reclaim the words and give greater exposure to the Church.

Hall saw the provocative campaign as a comedic opportunity.

"I used them all on the air," he said. "It was the only time I have ever been able to say those words on Radio-Canada and I got to pin it on the Church."