As one of my first blogging acts of this bold new year, I find myself in the position of having to issue an apology to a fairly select group of people – new arrivals to Canada who play the accordion.
In my last post of 2004, I was sarcastically critical of a roving accordion player’s choice of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” as a Christmas selection with which to regale us at our office complex’s food court. I even went so far as to speculate that the apparently unfortunate melody might have resulted from a recent arrival to one of our three coasts’ unfamiliarity with Christmas music, and who had limited his research to a Google search of “Glory Hallelujah”.
I believe that in England they have an expression, “Well I’ll be gob-smacked!”
Well, I’ll be that for sure.
On Friday the 24th of December, I treated myself to a cab ride home at noon when the office closed, because I had to drive for six hours to get where I wanted to be for Christmas Eve, and I wanted to get home to my car and on the road as quickly as possible. (As it turned out, the entire population of government workers in the National Capital Region thought precisely the same thing that day, and we got snarled in a large traffic jam along a road leading to the Queensway, the major East-West road through the city… but I digress.)
As I sat in the traffic-jammed cab mentally checklisting everything I had to do at home before heading out, I suddenly changed my half-listening to the cabbie’s radio station to all-listening as I realized I was listening to the music of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, but with French-language lyrics and a vocal chorus that replaced “His truth is marching on” with “Chantez, chantez Noel” (“Sing, sing Christmas”).
After Christmas, I paid a hasty internet visit to the home of my online friend, Google, and to my amazement turned up a French language Christmas carol called “Glory Alleluia”.
Well, I’ll be gob-smacked. (*)
(*) From Worldwide Words:
“[Q] From W S McCollom: ‘I was looking at a UK magazine and ran across gobsmack. What can you tell me about this term?’
[A] It’s a fairly recent British slang term: the first recorded use is only in the eighties, though verbal use must surely go back further. The usual form is gobsmacked, though gobstruck is also found. It’s a combination of gob, mouth, and smacked. It means ‘utterly astonished, astounded’. It’s much stronger than just being surprised; it’s used for something that leaves you speechless, or otherwise stops you dead in your tracks. It suggests that something is as surprising as being suddenly hit in the face. It comes from northern dialect, most probably popularised through television programmes set in Liverpool, where it was common. It’s an obvious derivation of an existing term, since gob, originally from Scotland and the north of England, has been a dialect and slang term for the mouth for four hundred years (often in insulting phrases like ‘shut your gob!’ to tell somebody to be quiet). It possibly goes back to the Scottish Gaelic word meaning a beak or a mouth, which has also bequeathed us the verb to gob, meaning to spit. Another form of the word is gab, from which we get gift of the gab.”
But I… oh, you know.
So from one who should have realized that in a work location on the Quebec side of the river that separates Ottawa (Ontario) from Gatineau (Quebec), he might have expected to hear a uniquely French Christmas carol, please consider this a lavish apology to, oh let’s see, accordion players, Italians, Italian accordion players, new immigrants, old immigrants – both if they are accordion players – (and just to be on the safe side, Romanian exotic dancers).
Here it is (to the tune of, yep, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”):
“Glory Alléluia!
La plus belle nuit du monde (“Mine eyes have seen the glory…”)
C'est cette nuit de Noël
Où des bergers étonnés
Levèrent les yeux vers le ciel
Une étoile semblait dire:
"Suivez-moi, je vous conduis.
Il est né cette nuit!"
Glory, Glory Alléluia!
Glory, Glory Alléluia!
Glory, Glory Alléluia!
Chantez, chantez Noël!
Ils ont suivi cette étoile
Sur les chemins de Judée
Et des quatre coins du monde
D'autres les ont imité
Et ce chant, comme une source,
A traversé le pays
Il est né cette nuit!
Glory, Glory Alléluia!
Glory, Glory Alléluia!
Glory, Glory Alléluia!
Chantez, chantez Noël!
La plus belle nuit du monde
C'est cette nuit de Noël
Où, au coeur de tous les hommes,
Un peu d'amour descend du ciel
Tant de choses les séparent
Cette étoile les unit
C'est la plus belle nuit!
Glory, Glory Alléluia!
Glory, Glory Alléluia!
Glory, Glory Alléluia!
Chantez, chantez Noël!”
(I hope your French is enough to appreciate the quite lovely sentiments conveyed by these lyrics, especially in that last verse.)
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OK, so there may be worse things to be called than “Phinnaeus”. Recalling some of my earlier eloquent waxings of Julia Roberts’s choice of names for her twins (Hazel and Phinnaeus), this note appears in Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia (“pronounced ‘Albin’”???):
“Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116 (pronounced ‘Albin’) was a name given to a Swedish child by his parents in May 1996. A district court in Halmstad, southern Sweden, had fined the parents (Elizabeth Hallin and ?) 5,000 kronor (approximately US$680 or €550) for failing to register a name for the boy by his fifth birthday. (The parents had planned to never legally name the child at all.) Responding to the fine, the parents submitted the 43-character name, claiming that it was ‘a pregnant, expressionistic development that we see as an artistic creation’, and suggesting that it should be seen in the spirit of pataphysics. The court rejected the name, and upheld the fine.”
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Happy New Year, everyone! The Year of the Green Wooden Rooster / Chicken is about to be launched on the Chinese calendar and yes, there are some depths to which even I will not sink. (Grateful sighs caress a few monitors scattered across the continent.)
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