We've been playing together for so long that now I can't speak unless he's doing that.
Bizarre.
Yes, I came here many years ago from England,
and I stayed because of something a Canadian girl said to me.
She said: "Okay."
I wasn't used to that.
Back in England, all they ever said to me was:
"Would you like something for the swelling?"
There's a freedom here. A freedom of expression.
Take the F-word, for example.
I'd always been told it was a bad word.
But I found out that in Canada, it's not a bad word. It's not even a word.
It's just a form of verbal punctuation.
Consider this sentence:
"Who drank all the beer, fuck?"
See now, there, the F-word is being used as a question mark.
Or you might hear this answer:
"You drank it all last night, fuck!"
So there, of course, the F-word is being used as an exclamation point.
I'd like to pass on my discovery to other immigrants, in the form of a short course.
The use of the F-word in Canada.
Present tense: fuck!
Now, if you're Italian, that's a complete sentence.
Maybe it would have ... it might have a little body language to it, you know.
Maybe a little bow. A grab.
Fuck!
The past tense: fucked.
Can also be the passive voice: "you're fucked."
There's the imperative: fuck you.
And the reflexive: fuck me.
And you may hear these both together, of course, in the combined form, the imperative reflexive:
Go fuck yourself!
There's the interrogative: what the fuck?
The ominous: oh, fuck.
In moments of great stress, you might hear the religious form: Holy fuck!
Or perhaps the fecal dismissive: Fuck that shit!
And in Quebec -
And only in Quebec - you'll hear the French version: foké
"C'est foké"
It sounds the same, but it's spelled differently.
According to Le Dictionnaire de la Langue Québécoise, de Léandre Bergeron,
the word foké is spelled F-O-K-E, accent aigue.
But you have to be careful because sometimes it's spelled F-O-K-E, accent aigue, e.
Parce que l'objet qui est foké peut être féminin
Now, this word was first uttered on television in Canada by the late René Levesque.
When he said: "c'était foké"
And then a journalist remarked that this was a bad word in English.
So Mr. Levesque said: "I fucked up."
And then he fucked off.
I love this country!