[2021-08-14] You gotta laugh
Last night I started listening to Son of a Critch, the hilarious autobiography of Mark Critch, the Newfoundland comedian who is the roving reporter on the long-running Canadian television show This Hour Has 22 Minutes.
Critch describes an encounter with a school-bus bully on his first day of kindergarten. The bully was attempting to steal Mark's lunch, and had already grabbed a bag of ketchup chips and a Pepsi before Mark managed to pull his lunch box away. "Hey," the bully shouted, "give me your Lune Moon." He was referring to a Vachon 1/2 Moon. "I had no idea what he was talking about," Mark recalls in his autobiography. "Soon I would come to learn that many families in St. John's read the French on packaging as if it were part of a product's name. This was especially the case when it came to buns [a generic term for the sweet treats produced by Vachon]. A ½ Moon became a ½ Lune Moon. A Log became a Billot Log. It was a kind of ignorance-based bilingualism."
I laughed at this story. Our kids did this with a few products: Vachon's Logs were called Billot Logs, and plain Frito-Lays Ruffles were called Regular Nature chips.
I, too, wasn't immune to misreading labels and signs. One time, when my family and I were traveling in Saguenay, Quebec, I saw a sign on the side of the road that said "S'lut." I blurted out in astonishment: "Slut?!?" Perhaps francophones would understand that "S'lut" was an abbreviation for "Salut" (hi), but my English eyes saw something else.
On another occasion, as we were driving through Chicoutimi, Quebec, I asked Chris: "What's a munger?" He was confused. "Well, what's a real munger?" I continued. "Oh," Chris groaned, "you mean Réal Munger," which was the name of the owner of the business. In my defence, the text was in all caps (REAL MUNGER), with no accents.
Perhaps, as Mark suggests in his book, this is a form of ignorance-based bilingualism, but I prefer to see it as charming and the stuff of family stories.
Here are three more anecdotes that reflect adorable interpretations of signs and words, even if they're not about misinterpretations of French text. When my daughter was very young, my husband pointed out a no-parking sign and asked her what it meant. Melanie cocked her head and stared at the sign, with its letter P surrounded by a circle with a slash through it, and announced that it meant "no Ps allowed." Similarly, when she was at a public pool, another little girl who was wearing a Medic Alert bracelet told Melanie that she was allergic to peanuts and asked what Melanie was allergic to. Melanie looked at her Medic Alert bracelet, with its symbol of a snake wrapped around a staff, and declared "Snakes." Finally, when Chris asked Melanie what Dr. meant, she said "Dister," assuming that if Mr. were the abbreviation for Mister, Dr. must be the abbreviation for Dister.
I hope that you had a chance to laugh today.
