For Sure (2 page)

“Ee says ee don't take drugs, I asked him. And I believes him, I do. Doesn't seem de type. All de same, ee's fed up wid school, fed up wid baseball, don't like de girls, don't want to come up to de country, don't want to go off to Europe, don't want his licence . . .”

“Might be ee's got a real disease, sometin' physical.”

“Dis evenin', at supper, lookin' at 'im, I couldn't help tinkin' suicide. Ruined a perfectly good stew, ee did.”

The 102 students, the vast majority of whom were women, were not asked to specify the shade of the colour they saw. For example, the red in question may have been nacarat, alizarin, scarlet, aniline, strawberry, crushed strawberry, raspberry, rubicond, crimson, poppy, ruby, lobster, crawfish, cardinal, dahlia, vermilion, English red, cherry, tomato, lust, ruddy, blood red, blood orange, purple, gules, peony, conclave, orangey, Tierra del Fuego, or picador, just to name a few.

Terry was as surprised as anyone to discover he not only had a voice, but also the ability to sing. Well, the ability to sing Léo Ferré singing Aragon, anyway. Lately he'd been amusing himself by singing some of the songs on the record for the kids when Carmen was at work. He was still far too shy about his new talent to sing in front of Carmen.

Over time, printers and typographers became distinct from editors. For example, from François Didot (born in 1689) to Alfred Firmin Didot (dead in 1913), four generations of Didots laboured in various printing related fields. Whereas François the patriarch was known to have edited all the works of the abbot Prévost, his descendants were particularly inventive in the fields of typography, printing, and paper production. In the end, with the publication of the Didot
French Commercial Directory
, they were no longer editors per se, since editing is first and foremost intellectual work.

“Because?”

“Because, because.”

Taloned 59, I(o)ta 6, (S)ize 31, (Z)en 12, Sev(e)n 16, (V)ie 10, H(a)m 15, (T)ow 17, Ble(w) 9, Re(l)at 18, Song 24, Jet(s) 28, P(e)r 15, Lai(r) 12, Jog 33, P(e)n 14, Fin(d) 18, Ra(f)t 26, Aio(l)i 5, Wef(t) 30, Qu(a) 24, L(e)g 16, Bo(a) 19, (a)xe 10, Hou(r) 25, Etc(h) 18, V(e)t 18, Tauru(s) 10, Idio(t) 10, D(i)kes 30, To(w)y 9, (G)am, 12. One player is left with a letter worth 4 points, for a total of 326 and 269 points.

“Well take fer example: ‘She gave him what for.' We say ‘whatfer.' Den why don't we write
whatfer
? De way we says an' hears it? Same as we write defer and refer . . .”

“Sure. Why not, I'd like to know.”

In the case of the letter
a
, only one of the 102 respondents named a colour the least bit out of the ordinary: auburn. All the other colours (except for the response “none,” if “none” can be considered a colour) could be found in the original HTML pallet created for web site designers. Although orange, beige, and gold were not among the list of coded colours, the designers had the option to use them by typing out the name of the colour. This was not the case for auburn (not to mention “none”).

He was a smash hit with Étienne and Marianne. The two kids were hypnotized by their dad, who had gone from warbling while he prepared the meal to suddenly belting out a song in a voice they did not recognize and mysterious words whose meanings they could only guess thanks to Terry's gestures and facial expressions, which helped to make the meaning clear. The two children were dimly aware of witnessing something new being created before their eyes. At the end of this première presentation, Étienne stood agape, having never expected Terry to reply in such grand fashion to the simple question:

“Wot're you singin', Dad?”

With his Captain Haddock apron tied around his waist, Terry had seized the moment. He'd turned down the heat under the hamburger steak sizzling in the pan, raised the wooden spoon to capture the kids' attention, opened the floodgates and sang:
I sing to pass the time / What little of it remains to me / The way we draw on a frosted window / The way we gladden our heart . . .
which pleased him because these opening lines immediately invoked pleasant things like drawing, a glad heart, and skipping stones across a pond. He also liked the word
petit
at the beginning of the next verse, because it allowed him to reply more directly to his son's question.

AUBURN
\'c:ben, -be:n adjective. IME. Orig., of a yellowish- or brownish-white colour. Now, of a golden- or reddish-brown colour. (Used esp. of a person's hair.)

ORIGIN: Old French
albome, auborne
, from medieval Latin
albumus
whitish, from Latin
albus
white: later assoc. with
brown
by false etymology (through forms with metathesis).

MAHOGANY
me;hogeni adjective. Of the colour of polished mahogany: rich reddish-­brown. Origin unknown. Excerpt from
Oxford English Dictionary
.

Terry had wanted to hang a large artistic poster of various styles of type at the entrance to the bookstore, by the cash register. The poster was meant to refer to the origin of the bookstore's name: Didot.

“Wot does you tink, den? Does she come across too . . . intellectual? Wouldn' want folks to tink we was full o' ourselves, or de like.”

“Naw, she's fine. A whole lot o' class. Folks'll like her, fer sure.”

Terry knew he could trust Zed's opinion.

“I likes where de letters is all piled up in de corner down der.”

Terry was particularly proud of the poster, especially the way the graphic designer — a fellow named Babin from Dieppe — had taken up his suggestions. Zed confirmed his opinion:

“Naw, I'm tellin' ya, she's right proper.”

In her novel
1953: Chronicle of a Birth Foretold
, the Acadian author France Daigle makes no mention of that year's publication of the first edition of the
Dictionnaire
Robert
by a small publishing house founded by Paul Robert, with an inheritance from his family, who'd owned an orange plantation.

“Wot was ee wantin' den?”

“He was askin' if we eats c
hiard
every day.”

“Wot fer? Are dey in de habit of eatin' potato hash every day, den?”

“Naw. Dey never even seen c
hiard
'fore now.”

“I figured. Gumbo's wot dey eats.”

“Every day?”

“Dunno, do I. Go an' ask 'em, why dontcha.”

A quick overview of the chromatic dictionary of the web site pourpre.com yielded 33 names of colours that, like auburn, begin with the letter
a
. In French, 12 percent of the 281 colours listed in that dictionary begin with the letter
a
. Only the letter
c
accounts for more: the 48 colours beginning with the third letter of the alphabet amount to 17 percent of the entries in this dictionary. By contrast, the English Wikipedia site lists 36 names of colours beginning with the letter
a
. This amounts to slightly more than 4 percent of the 869 colours listed. This number is surpassed by 9 letters including the
c
which, just as in French, accounts for the most names of colours: 91 or slightly more than 10 percent of the total.

“Well, if dem's useless details like she says, why does dey have to keep goin' on about 'em, I'd like to know.”

“Proper question.”

. . .

“Probably because, in absolute terms, useless don't exist.”

“Now yer pullin' me leg.”

Cited without permission from
Webster's Third New International Dictionary
©:

PLAGIARIST
n:
(lat. plagiarus, from the gr.). one who plagiarizes: one guilty of literary or artistic theft.

PLAGIARISM
n.: an act or instance of plagiarizing.

PLAGIARIZE
v. t.: to steal and pass off as one's own (the ideas or words of another).

It was quite late by the time Terry could finally relax and review the events of his day. He wondered if Étienne's desire to put off sleep as long as possible wasn't a sign of some sort of existential anxiety. Now he regretted not having had a father's reflex to take up the issue more closely and on the spot. Was he already becoming one of those blasé parents?

With the emergence of typography in the middle of the fifteenth century, the trades of printer, typographer, editor, bookseller, and stationer became intertwined and interelated with other vocations, such as philosopher, author, and lexicographer. Geoffroy Tory, who was born in Bourges around 1480 and died in Paris in 1533, was at once a humanist, author, professor, bookseller-editor, printer, designer, theorist of typography, and a linguist. He was a strong advocate for the use of the apostrophe and added the cedilla to the French
c
when pronounced as
s
, a distinction he found both useful and appealing. Not content with perfecting the shapes of typefaces, Geoffroy Tory also weighed in on their correct pronunciation, thereby contributing to the standardisation of a hitherto highly diversified French language.

“Dad, did you change yer time?”

“My time fer wot?”

“Not yer time fer sometin', just yer time.”

Terry looked up from his newspaper, struck by what his son had said.

“Yer right! Naw, I never did change it, good ting yer remindin' me!”

Terry immediately started fiddling with his watch.

“Is it true den dat everybody does it?”

“Change de time? Well, I can't say if everybody in de ‘ole wide world does it, but fer sure a whole lot of folks do. All the folks in Canada anyhow.”

“But why? Is de time we've got no good no more?”

“Well we got to line up wid de sun, don't we. See, in summer, de sun comes up earlier, so dat's good fer de gardens. In winter, gets dark long about supper time, and dat's de time folks come in fer de night, 'cause it's too cold. Not like summer evenin's when it's nice to stay outdoors.”

Étienne nodded; then he looked outside.

“Well den, today, is it winter or summer?”

The inventor Butts (1900–1993) decided on the value and quantity of each letter in his game based on an in-depth study of letters found on the front page of the
New York Times
.

Even though Terry does fairly well with his children, fatherhood remains something of a puzzle to him. Sure, he followed Carmen's pregnancies closely, and he was there by her side through both births, but even doing his part in all the housework, including bringing up the kids, Terry feels fatherhood is not so easily achieved.

“Lucky fer me you gives me a part to play, you make out like I's important.”

“You are important!”

“I know, I knows it. Dat's not what I was meaning to say. Only it's like fer you it comes automatic like. Being yer de mudder, 'tis like magic. Whereas in my case, well . . .”

Carmen, uncomfortable with this apparent lack of balance, sought to encourage Terry.

“Sure it looks easier fer me. Sometimes just my being the mother seems like enough. Only kids need more dan dat, don't dey. You take 'em all sorts of places out in de world, and you explain dem all kinds of things. Me, well sometimes I can't be boddered, or I don't even think to do it.”

Carmen's words went some way toward reassuring Terry.

“Well, you know how it used to be: dads just standin' there and decidin' what was good fer de family. They never did take de time to care fer each child, did dey. Nowadays things are different. An' aren't you de perfect example of how they've changed for de better?”

“We've a couple books 'bout dat at de bookstore. I've not really looked at 'em doh.”

And with that, Terry slipped between the sheets, and Carmen completed her thought:

“Don't forget, really all that yer doing now'll add up later on.”

“So long as it adds up sometime, I suppose.”

A hodge-podge of seventeenth century and modern French, of English words pronounced in an English accent, English words pronounced in a French accent, and a syntactical mix drawn from both languages, Chiac is predominantly the lingua franca of the Acadians of southeastern New Brunswick. In spite of its echos of First Nation speech (Shediac, Kouchibougouac, Tabusintac) nothing is less certain than the origin of the word Chiac. And still today, to speak Chiac evokes a kind of dishonour.

“You don't remember the X-3X-X3-X test?”

Marianne had to admit she had no idea what her brother was talking about.

“De story of Souricette! You knows it,
souris sept
: mouse number seven? Wid all dose mice dat died in de warm half of de labyrinth!”

Marianne wanted very much to please her brother, but she had absolutely no memory of his story.