Catholic curses
Tabernac! There. I've said it and I hope you'll forgive me for my impolite language. In French Quebec, you see, tabernac, sacrement, ciboire, calisse and other Catholic terms are the sorts of words you might shout out if you'd just hit your thumb with a hammer or learned your daughter was dating a drug dealer. It is not something you'd throw into a conversation over dinner with your mother-in-law.
Now, after almost four centuries of the loose use of sacred vocabulary, the Catholic Church has had enough. It has launched a province-wide advertising campaign to make people aware of the true religious meaning of words used in French to express anger, excitement, pain and other states of emotional agitation.
The tabernac, or tabernacle - says one of the campaign billboards - is 'a small cupboard in the middle of the altar'. For you non-Catholics out there, the tabernacle holds the chalice (calisse) in which the wafers that symbolise the body of Christ are placed.
Crikey, as my boss would say, do they really think an advertising campaign is going to flush such ingrained terms from common parlance? All cultures develop their own taboos. Think of urban youth culture today, where the dirtiest curse in the vocabulary of many youngsters suggests you're far too close to your mother.
Quebec was founded in the 1630s by Catholic immigrants from France. Its population growth was fuelled not by immigration, but by the fecundity of the original settlers.
At one time, it had the highest birth rate in the world. Families of 12 or more children were common until the 1950s.
It was a profoundly homogenous and socially cohesive society. The church was the state: it ran the province's schools, social services and hospitals. Taking a religious term in vain was about the most outrageous thing you could say.
None of this is true any longer. A political movement in the 1960s dubbed the Quiet Revolution brought the province into the mainstream of North America. Quebecers abandoned the church in droves, church attendance plummeted and schools, social services and hospitals were secularised.
What is peculiar, then, about the church's campaign is not just how daunting a task it has set for itself but how out of date it all is. Unlike swear words in other languages, which relate to bodily functions and sexual practices, Catholic cusses lost their frisson a couple of centuries back.
They still aren't terms you'd use in polite company. But you can be sure that young people in Quebec, like young people everywhere, have moved on - developing much more colourful and outrageous terms to mock the pieties of their parents.
