To Hab and Hab Not

Earl Fowler

Feeling neglected and a little bleu, perhaps, what with all the media attention being showered on Canada’s federal election and the ongoing shit show in what Gore Vidal used to call the United States of Amnesia, Quebec’s language police came up with another winning entry this week in the Flapping Gonad Stupidity Sweepstakes / Concours sur la stupidité des gonades qui battent.

Here’s a condensed version of my old colleague Andy Riga’s story in the Montreal Gazette:

First, Quebec targeted Hi. Now, it’s going after another two-letter English word: Go. The province’s language watchdog has told Montreal’s transit agency to stop displaying messages like “GO! Canadiens GO!” on its bus electronic displays because Go is an English word, The Gazette has learned.

As a result, during the Habs’ playoff run, the Société de transport de Montréal will instead feature “Allez! Canadiens Allez!” on its buses.

“Following a complaint it received last year about a message displayed on a bus sign reading ‘GO! CF MTL GO!,’ the Office québécois de la langue française asked the STM to modify its message,” transit agency spokesperson Isabelle Tremblay said.

CF Montréal is the name of the city’s professional soccer team. “Since the word Go is considered an anglicism, the STM committed to removing it from bus signs,” Tremblay said.

OQLF spokesperson Gilles Payer confirmed receiving a complaint about the word Go. He said the OQLF advised the STM that under Quebec law, “government bodies must set an example by using French, which means refraining from employing English terms in their signage.”

What does the language watchdog consider the most appropriate way to say “Go Habs Go” in French?

“The Office adopts a supportive approach with government bodies and never mandates one correction over another,” Payer said. “The government body may submit a proposed version to the Office, which will then verify whether it complies with the requirements of the Charter of the French Language.”

Montreal Canadiens fans use both Go and Allez when they cheer on the team. The popular “Go Habs Go” slogan — featured prominently on the team’s official social media channels — pairs the English word Go with Habs, an anglicized shorthand for habitants, the early settlers of New France.

Some prefer to join the French “Allez, allez, allez, allez Montréal” refrain from Loco Locass’s Habs‑inspired anthem “Le But.” The fact that Go is an English word has not deterred some staunch defenders of the French language. Parti Québécois Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, for example, has used the hashtag #GoHabsGo on the X social media platform twice in recent weeks. Even Premier François Legault favoured the hashtag #GoHabsGo until 2021. …

The ban on the word Go mirrors Quebec’s attempts to discourage store employees from greeting customers with Bonjour-Hi, a controversial phrase that blends English and French. In 2017, Quebec’s National Assembly unanimously passed a motion, backed by all political parties, encouraging merchants to greet customers with a simple “bonjour.”

Two years later, the Legault government floated the idea of formally banning Bonjour-Hi. It quickly backed down after critics said it would be impossible to legislate conversations between citizens and store workers.

Andy’s story is good as far as it goes, I mean vas, but he’s such a terrific reporter that I was surprised he didn’t dig a little deeper into some other recent diktats from the language gendarmerie.

Par exemple, it seems nothing can be done to tamp down the continuing enthusiasm of ordinary Québécois for le Roi du Rocher ’n’ Rouler. But vous can insist, as the office has, that Elvis hits be introduced under properly Frenchified titles. Burning Love is henceforth to be known as Amour Brûlant. Vous can probablement figure these autres out votre-self: Ne Sois Pas Cruel, Un Peu Moins de Conversation, Je Ne Peux Pas M’empêcher de Tomber Amoureux, and so forth et comme ça.

Out of its usual sense of fair play, the Office québécois de la langue française has extended the ruling to include such contemporary English performers as Les Scarabées (a band known for such tunes as Champs de Fraises Pour Toujours and Bonjour-Hi, Au Revoir), Les Garçons de la Plage (Surfer aux États-Unis, Sois Fidèle à Ton École) and Céline Dion (Mon Coeur Continuera and So That You Love Me Again).

That last one might be a software glitch.

There’s no besoin here to get into the sprawling history of resistance in Quebec to the global spread of English, which helped spawn a separatist movement dating to at least the dying days of the Second World War.

Loi 101, the “Charter of the French Language” introduced by René Lévesque’s Parti-Québécois government after its election in 1976, greatly limited the use of English billboards, posters and signs on storefronts. In a process that continues today, businesses were increasingly “francicized.” With some exceptions, students were no longer allowed to attend English-language schools unless their parents had been educated in English in Quebec. And so on et comme ça, comme on l’avait dit.

Even in France, proud home of what had been the international language par excellence for centuries, concerns about the rising dominance of English — spoken by at least a quarter of the world’s population — have prompted successive presidents to undertake measures designed to strengthen and protect la langue de Molière since the mid-1970s.

This is from my 1986 copy of The Story of English by Robert McCrum, William Cran and Robert MacNeil:

“We must not let the idea take hold that English is the only possible instrument for industrial, economic and scientific communities,” said President (Georges) Pompidou. He, and his successor Giscard d’Estaing and, later, President (François) Mitterrand’s Socialists, took a series of government-sponsored initiatives to check the spread of la langue de Coca-Cola, abolishing borrowed words where possible and inventing suitable French alternatives. Hot money became capitaux fébriles, jumbo jet became gros porteur and fast food turned into prêt-à-manger. Despite these efforts, it is estimated that, in a newspaper like Le Monde, one word in 166 will be English. Another calculation claims that about one-twentieth of the day-to-day French vocabulary is composed of anglicisms.

There are many reasons for the massive global dominance of English today — British colonialism and the pre-eminence of the United States after the Second World War first among them — but à mon avis, a crucial driving force has been the simple absence of an overweening authority like the Académie Française to rail against such imported atrocities as le weekend, le drugstore and le playboy.

A major player in the ascension of English as a glutton for glossary and the world’s first truly global language is its promiscuity, its voracious affinity for adopting and repurposing words from other languages instead of clutching its dictionaries in horror like the French. Quelle honte!

As a chatty, eager-to-please, slightly confused mutt of a language, English is the linguistic equivalent of a golden retriever at an international buffet. It runs in tail-wagging excitement to every cultural table, sniffs around and proudly returns with a mouthful of someone else’s vocabulary.

Unlike its distant, more reserved cousin M. Français — who inspects every foreign term like a TSA agent at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport — English opens its arms and says, “Come on in! You’re family now. Mi casa es su casa ... or however you say that in Spanish.”

Let us first take a moment to appreciate just how many languages English has raided. Latin? Sure, we borrowed half its words and the sense of eternal doom. German? Of course, we took “kindergarten,” “schadenfreude,” and a vague sense of efficiency.

Japanese gave us “karaoke,” “tsunami,” and the existential dread that comes from trying to fold fitted sheets — oh wait, that last one might still be German.

Even Hindi lent a hand with “bungalow,” “shampoo,” and “pyjamas,” thus contributing directly to the English-speaking world’s two favourite activities: lounging and avoiding responsibility while ripping off other countries. Like India, say.

English’s approach is simple: If it sounds cool, tastes good or conveys an emotion previously unknown to native speakers of Yorkshire or Iowa, it’s getting adopted. No paperwork, no grammar visa necessary. Just a big, slobbery welcome hug.

And if the word doesn’t quite fit? No problem! English will force it into a sentence with all the grace of a toddler trying to jam a square peg into a round hole — “I was totally having déjà vu while eating sushi during my siesta at the café. Très chic, right?”

French authorities guard their self-mandated lexical gates like dragons hoarding golden gerunds. The Académie Française — a real-life council of mostly older men in fancier hats than you will ever own — is tasked with keeping French pure, unsullied by the anglicized riff-raff trying to sneak in wearing sneakers instead of chaussures élégantes.

They invent proper French alternatives to invasive English terms, though the public largely ignores them. “Email”? No, no, courriel. “Le weekend”? Technically fin de semaine, but let’s not pretend anyone actually says that with a straight face. Except in Quebec.

French loves its structure, its elegance, its je ne sais quoi. English is the drunk guy at the language party who’s mixing vodka with kombucha and calling it a cultural exchange.

English isn’t concerned with maintaining order — it thrives in chaos. It’s the linguistic equivalent of a secondhand bookstore: messy, diverse, occasionally smelling faintly of mildew, but full of surprises. It’s a place where Norse syntax, Latin vocabulary and American misspelling can all crash on the couch and share a pizza. French is more like a curated art museum — gorgeous, impressive, slightly intimidating, and prone to frowning when someone touches the exhibits.

Mais franchement, this linguistic promiscuity is exactly what makes English so globally beloved. Need a word for that peculiar pleasure in someone else’s misfortune? “Schadenfreude” is already here. Want to describe something so cute it makes your heart ache? “Kawaii” has clocked in. Need to name a new fusion restaurant? Just throw in “bistro,” “tapas,” and “umami,” and voilà — people will think you studied abroad.

Forty years ago, when The Story of English guys were researching their book, even they sounded gobsmacked by the vastness of their topic:

The statistics of English are astonishing. Of all the world’s languages (which now number some 2,700), it is arguably the richest in vocabulary. The compendious Oxford English Dictionary lists about 500,000 words; and a further half million technical and scientific terms remain uncatalogued. According to traditional estimates, neighbouring German has a vocabulary of about 185,000 words and French fewer than 100,000, including such Franglais as le snaque-barre and le hit-parade.

That disparity has only grown since, thanks in part to efforts by well-meaning but wrongheaded agencies such as the Office québécois de la langue française.

Spend five minutes on a Montreal métro car, listening in on teenagers switching effortlessly, if not always elegantly, from French to English without giving it a second pensée (just as in Indian movies the actors bounce back and forth between English and sundry Indian languages), and the futility of trying to pickle one’s tongue in a Mason jar becomes obvious.

English is the world’s most indiscriminate word collector: part sponge, part kleptomaniac, part goofy, gormless tourist. It’s absurd, endearing and occasionally incomprehensible, but above all, it’s inclusive. It doesn’t always make sense, but it always makes room. The next time you sip a latte while reading a manga before heading to your yoga class, remember: English didn’t invent any of those words — but it sure as heck made them feel at home.

Which is why “Go Habs Go” will never die. The language police have missed the bus. Encore une time.

SCORE ONE FOR LES BOYS (PEUT ÊTRE. PEUT-ÊTRE PAS):

Here’s the beginning of Andy Riga’s follow-up story posted to The Gazette website on Friday:

Quebec is endorsing the expression “Go Habs Go” after being ridiculed for telling the Société de transport de Montréal to drop the English word “Go” on bus messages that support the Montreal Canadiens and other local teams. In a message posted on social media on Friday morning, French Language Minister Jean-François Roberge said “Go Habs Go” is “an expression that’s part of our DNA, our identity.”

“It’s a unifying expression, rooted in our history, and part of our unique cultural and historical identity. It has been used for decades. It’s a Quebecism, and we’re proud of it.” He said he has had discussions with the Office québécois de la langue française. “It is now clear to us that this established expression must never be called into question,” Roberge said.

“I’m announcing that from now on, if a complaint is made to the OQLF about the use of this expression, it will be deemed inadmissible.” A spokesperson for Roberge later clarified that complaints against phrases like “Go Canadiens Go” are also no longer admissible. However, the head of the OQLF appeared to contradict the minister in a social media post, implying that Go remains a no-go word for public bodies.

Keep your stick on the ice and eye on the bouncing puck. Next thing you know, Tom Wilson and Josh Anderson will be brawling on a bench somewhere.