PROBLEMS WITH “SO-CALLED” AND «SOI-DISANT»

In English-speaking anarchist, radical left, and onkwehón:we sovereignty circles in the Ottawa-administered part of Turtle Island, it is common to append the word “so-called” to any mention of a place on this continent whose name is colonial in origin. Generally speaking, the hyphenated word “so-called” is written out without quote marks, whereas the colonial name is in quotes. Examples: “so-called ‘Canada'”, “so-called ‘New Brunswick'”.

This is a sort of land acknowledgement, although it should probably be thought of as a weak acknowledgement rather than a strong one. By itself, saying “so-called” doesn’t call attention to the specific fact that the place so described is part of the territory of one or more onkwehón:we nations. It literally indicates nothing more than the fact that, indeed, the place is frequently referred to by the name we are using to refer to it. As analysis, this would make for a rather banal observation. Worse, it is an observation that can be made about basically anything. For example, ai might offer you a so-called chair, because, indeed, the chair is so-called. Why is it called “chair” instead of “gizunga” or “bumrest” or “koobidactly”?

The word “so-called”, of course, is functional as a descriptor, but it is not actually being used for a descriptive purpose in particular. It is being used more as a pejorative, more for its rhetorical effect. What it literally says isn’t particularly important, because all the meaning is in the tone – something that is quite audible when we say “so-called” then the toponym aloud, and which can still be indicated in a textual format through the addition of quote marks around the toponym.

If we overuse the word “so-called”, it loses that rhetorical effect. But before getting into that, let’s discuss the hyphenated word that is used to translate “so-called” in French, namely «soi-disant».

A closer translation of «soi-disant» to English would be “self-saying”, but it’s probably better to translate it as “self-styled” or “self-described” in most circumstances. Thus, in reference to «Québec» (the name to which «soi-disant» is most frequently appended, with «Montréal» probably coming in at a close second), what is literally being said is that Québec calls itself «Québec».

Ai don’t like this. First off, it isn’t only Québec (read: Québecers) that calls itself (read: themselves) Québec, because if a Chilean or a Senegalese or a Bulgarian is talking about Québec for some reason, ey will call it «Québec» as well (or use the equivalent name in their language).

«Soi-disant» doesn’t say that no one else is describing it as such, of course, but even if Québec changed its name, this doesn’t guarantee that others would pay any attention. This is true of Canada, too, although its rather unlikely that either Québec or Canada will change their official names any time soon.

Many people still refer to Myanmar as “Burma” (or «Birmanie» in French) despite the name change in 1989, and it took a very long time for people for the names “Persia” and “Siam” to go out of style for Iran and Thailand respectively. Lots of people still call the Congo «Zaïre» – and why not, since there is another country called the Congo next door, which is just a “republic” instead of a “democratic republic”. Speaking of republics, the Czech Republic would like it known that the country is actually called “Czechia” in English and «Tchéquie» in French; you should only refer to “the Czech Republic” when you’re referring to the government. As for the Netherlands («Pays-Bas» in French), the locals have practically given up on getting people to use the correct name; even the country’s state-supported tourism website uses the name “Holland”, since, as this guy points out, that’s what people are probably looking up on Google if they want to book a vacation there.

But let’s concede that, at the moment, Québec and Canada are self-described as such – by their government and by those who, more or less, comprise what can be called Québécois and Canadian society. Yet the Québec, or wherever else, being referred to in «le soi-disant ‘Québec’» is, usually, not the government and not the society. It’s the place called Québec. It’s the land. In this case, «soi-disant» (again, “self-described” or “self-styled” in English) does not work. A place can be “so-called”, but it cannot be «soi-disant» because a place does not describe itself. A place does not speak, neither about itself nor about anything else.

This is my more serious objection to «soi-disant» as a translation. Taken literally, it says something nonsensical: the mountains, the trees, and the soil are proclaiming themselves to be named Québec! Taken less literally, it would seem to reify some kind of inherent and timeless relationship between Québecers (who can self-describe) to the territory called Québec. Such reification is, to say the least, problematic.

It seems to me that better translations for “so-called” are available. Google Translate provides «ainsi nommé» as a possible alternative, although ai suspect that this lacks the same sarcastic/dismissive tone that’s imbued in “so-called”, «soi-disant», “self-styled”, and “self-described”. Perhaps it could be imbued with such a tone over time, though. It might also be possible to say «ce qu’on appelle» before each mention of a colonial name. Ultimately, though, this is a matter that a mother tongue speaker needs to put eir mind to – not me.

Realistically, though, ai suspect «soi-disant» will be difficult to supplant as the standard anti-colonial toponym descriptor in the French language without a change to the way that said descriptor is applied in the normative anarchist discourse of both languages. In English, for example, the descriptor is used in a large number of cases – very often for cities and towns, and definitely for provinces and Canada itself. The style in French is to apply it to the same cases as in English.

Frankly, this is too many cases.

First off, there is a clear difference between cities, towns, and villages in comparison to provinces or the territory of the Canadian state in its entirety. Like, compare Saskatchewan to some of the settlements that exist within it, like Saskatoon or Regina. Whereas Saskatchewan is actually just a gigantic rectangle superimposed upon the oblate spheroid of Earth – a jurisdiction whose borders don’t even roughly correspond with natural geographic features like rivers or mountains – the settlements actually have some substance to them. There are buildings, roads, parks, shopping malls, etc. These settlements concretely exist. If we wouldn’t refer to “so-called ‘McGill University'”, “so-called ‘rue Sherbrooke'”, or “so-called ‘parc Jeanne-Mance'”, it doesn’t really make sense to refer to “so-called ‘Montréal'”.

Of course, municipal borders can be quite arbitrary too. Montréal is the perfect example of this. For example, while Westmount – adjacent to the western end of downtown Montréal, and completely surrounded on all sides by three of Montréal’s boroughs – exists as a separate city, the essentially rural Île Bizard is administered from Montréal City Hall. The situation was even more ridiculous before the 2002 merger, when today’s borough of Rivière-des-Prairies–Pointe-aux-Trembles was cut off from the rest of the city by the separate municipalities of Montréal-Est (still separate today), Anjou, and Montréal-Nord. All that said, there is still a sense of what is and what isn’t Montréal that exists quite apart from whatever the actual borders are. See also: the Halifax Regional Municipality versus the actual place that most people would think of when you say “Halifax”.

It’s pretty easy to imagine a very bourgeois anglophone in Westmount speaking disparagingly of somewhere being part of “so-called ‘Montréal'” during the period from 2002 to 2004 when all smaller municipalities on the island had their autonomy revoked. Similarly, a farmer in Musquodoboit Valley today, pissed off that he pays extra taxes even though he doesn’t even get bus service, might say the same about somewhere within the municipal borders of Halifax. In both cases, anti-colonial politics probably aren’t present, and there is no calling-into-question of Montréal or Halifax as places that exist. It’s simply that the official designations of these places do not correspond with either the intuitive reality, the perception of how it should be, or both.

For us, as anarchists, it must be said that we usually have a pretty strong sense of where we are. We have opinions, for example, about what the neighbourhoods we live in are called (see the slogan FUCK! HO! MA! MON QUARTIER EST HOCHELAGA!) and what the borders of those neighbourhoods are. These borders are usually pretty intuitive. Where they aren’t, they are usually ignored. Using another Montréal example, who actually cares about the distinction between Ville-Émard and Côte-Saint-Paul or the distinction between Hochelaga and Maisonneuve? If you’re like me, you call the whole thing Ville-Émard or Hochelag’, respectively, and then you don’t worry about it.

We don’t append the names of neighbourhoods with the word “so-called”, or at least ai’ve never heard of people doing so. Montréal as a whole, however, often gets the “so-called” treatment. This is despite the fact that probably most of us have a sense of what is and what isn’t Montréal that runs contrary to the official definition. For example, if you live here, you would probably group Île Bizard and Pierrefonds (administered as part of Montréal) in with Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Dorval, and Beaconsfield (separate municipalities); it’s all just the West Island to you! The distinction is self-evident, and that’s true whether you tend to speak of so-called Montréal or not.

This long tangent had a purpose. My proposal is that we should reserve use of the word “so-called” for cases where the official definitions of places do not correspond with intuitive conceptions of place that are widely held by the people who live in those places. In the case of Montréal – and all settlements – this means generally dropping the use of the name “so-called”. There might be times when it makes sense to use, but probably few. If we want to say that Île Bizard is part of the Montréal municipality, for instance, it’s probably easier to just say it like that, without “so-called”.

My proposal doesn’t apply only to settlements, though. It may also apply to larger regions. Québec, for example.

To me, it makes intuitive sense to think of Québec as being anywhere that significant numbers of Québecers live – and so as to exclude certain neighbourhoods of Miami, anywhere where they perceive the land to be standing upon to be Québécois. Ai don’t think it makes sense to refer to this area as “so-called ‘Québec'” because doing so seems to imply that Québec is just some arbitrary, ephemeral thing. It isn’t. There are clear, experiential differences between being in Québec and not-Québec.

Ai’ve had friends argue that these differences are “produced by the state”, and therefore somehow illegitimate as criteria by which to define a territory, but ai reject that argument. Obviously Québec is a contrivance of colonial state institutions, but it is not simply the state that makes it real. If the borders were all to be rendered meaningless tomorrow, and all the police and politicians sucked into a black hole, there would still be settlements with all-French signage, inhabited by people who not only understand themselves as Québecers, but who also have typically Québécois understandings of reality. On opinions about gun control, abortion, climate change, wind power, the Alberta tar sands, the Queen, the war in Afghanistan, and so on, you will notice a statistically significant and consistent difference between Québec and the rest of the Canadas. Although ai’m at a loss to find it now, ai once saw a page that showed several maps of the Canadas in relation to these each of these subjects, with each province shaded in accordance with the aggregate of responses in that province to random telephone polling. Québec was typically at the extreme of opinion in relation to the other provinces, and, in several cases, it was a clear outlier.

This doesn’t simply have to do with language, for the record. Years after “German reunification” in 1990, there is still a very noticeable social difference between those living in territory that corresponds to the erstwhile German Democratic Republic, and those living in the rest of Germany. Simply put, the fact that East Germany was administered by a different state for so long – one which had a very different legal system and political structure, took a very different approach to the economy, and which sought to inculcate the population with different values – matters quite a bit, even now, a generation since the moment that Realsozialismus was abolished in Germany and the whole of what we call “Germany” today came under the sovereignty of a single unitary state.

An important point, though: my definition of Québec includes much less territory than either of the official territorial definitions. It might generously account for a fifth of the territory that is administered by the Canadian state as part of the province of Québec. This is because, in the great northern expanse of this territory, French is usually a third language, there is typically an extra level of governance between the locality and Québec City (this level being either a band council or regional development corporation), the economy and demographics are entirely different, and so on and so forth.

Ai would argue that a way of talking about Québec that directly challenges the ambitions of megalomaniacal nationalists, but that doesn’t imply that Québec is a total fiction, has a much better chance of spreading a better understanding of the situation in the larger population. This pretty much requires the dropping of “so-called ‘Québec'” as a style, though, since the perception of 80% of the province’s territory as being not-Québec requires an acceptance that the rest basically is. This is an easier argument to make, an easier argument to swallow, for those who intuit Québec as extant. It doesn’t directly call attention to the reality of Québec as a settler-colonial society on stolen onkwehón:we land, but then again, neither does saying “so-called”. And it certainly doesn’t deny settler colonialism, either, which is the thing we would really need to worry about.

Different provinces are different – for example, “British Columbia”, the first geographic entity to which it became popular to append the word “so-called”. The thing about British Columbia is that it doesn’t really make any sense as a territory; there isn’t really a British Columbian society that has unique characteristics, cultural or otherwise, unto itself which aren’t shared with neighbouring societies. A lot of things that you might think of as uniquely British Columbian are really just shared with other parts of what we can think of as Cascadian society. The conservative settler society of the interior, a lacuna in most perceptions of British Columbia, is probably on the same political continuum as settler society in rural Alberta. The only thing that holds British Columbia together, then, is the state. If Vancouver Island had been incorporated into Canada as a separate province, or if Fort St. John and other such locales had been included in Alberta, ai consider it pretty unlikely that we would be able to perceive any transcendant British Columbianess uniting these places in defiance of the borders.

Compare and contrast this situation to Kurdistan or Acadie. Compare and contrast, too, to the situation in many parts of the former Soviet Union, where significant portions of the population reject the authority of whatever former Soviet republic now rules them as a sovereign state (or, at the least, attempts to do so). Finally, imagine Montréal becoming a separate Canadian province, as some people want. Exactly how many nationalists, within this new province or outside of it, would suddenly change their definition of Québec’s territory to match the new official reality?

Ai’d say the frequent, consistent use of “so-called ‘British Columbia'” makes a lot of sense. It further denaturalizes a conception of place that is already pretty incongruent with popular perceptions. A lot of people in Prince George can’t relate to what life is like in Victoria, and vice versa; even in the sort of future anarchist utopia that has regional coordination between federated communities (you know, bolo’bolo style), it’s hard to imagine many situations where people in both these cities would ever even need to discuss anything with one another to the exclusion of, say, people on the other side of today’s border with the United States.

It’s important to note that one of the original reasons for describing British Columbia as so-called, as frequently cited by people involved in the anti-colonial/anti-capitalist campaign against the 2010 Olympic Games, is because – with the exception of the sparsely populated parts of the province’s northeast, which falls under the purview of Treaty 8 – the entire province exists on unceded land. If this is the characteristic by which we determine whether a geographic entity should be consistently described as “so-called” or not, then Québec is even more deserving of the label than British Columbia; as a percentage of its official territory, Québec is comprised of even more unceded land than B.C. is.

Ai don’t think unceded land, however, is something that we should really take into consideration for this purpose. First of all, Treaty 8 – like most other treaties that ceded land to the British crown, if not all of them – was signed under duress, and second, fuck colonial law anyway. The decisions that we make, whether about how we are going to refer to particular places or about anything else, should never be predicated on the idea that the Canadian state has “legitimate title” to any of its claimed territory. Ai understand why people talk about treaties, and ai don’t think it’s necessarily bad to do so, but ultimately, treaties should not matter to us except in the context of making arguments for the courts.

In any case, saying “so-called ‘British Columbia'” is a means to ease people into a conversation about settler colonialism (and, if you like, treaties or the lack thereof), whereas “so-called ‘Québec'” isn’t useful to this end. “So-called” works for B.C. because B.C. already doesn’t make sense, even to settlers. It isn’t a name with which people strongly identify compared to names that designate smaller areas, such as “Okanagan Valley”, “Vancouver”, “Vancouver Island”, or even “northern British Columbia”. “Québec”, on the other hand, is very experientially real to most of the population of that territory designated as Québec, as well as the people who visit that territory. People perceive, accurately, that there is a Québécois society that has distinctive characteristics, and that this society has some relationship to a particular territory.

One aspect of this society-to-territory relationship is settler-colonial occupation. This is clear to us, the minority of people with at least moderately developed anti-colonial politics, but it is not clear to others. It is something that, at least to some degree, ai think we would all like to make clear to the larger population. Ai don’t have the answer as to how to do that, exactly, but it seems to me that questioning the existence of Québec – which the appendage of the word “so-called” to that toponym seems to do, though perhaps unintentionally – is not an effective means to this end, especially because it seems likely to spur confusion, and because it undermines the more pressingly necessary effort to get self-conceived Québecers to stop thinking that they own that great expanse to the north of where they live. It is the Labrador Peninsula, after all, that is currently undergoing the most accelerated development in Québec City-administered territory.

“So-called”, as a standard anti-colonial toponym descriptor, is now a cliché. That’s fine! Clichés, while not actually saying very much about anything, are sometimes useful. And sometimes they aren’t. Ai’d say the case of B.C. is an example of this cliché being useful towards various ends. Ai’d say, again, that the case of Québec probably isn’t. But ai might be wrong on this, of course. At this point in the post, if you’ve made it so far, ai’m sure you either agree with the overall arch of my argument, or you don’t. Let me know!

Just before concluding, though, ai’d like to assert that it definitely isn’t useful to think that you need to say “so-called” every time you utter a colonial toponym as a means of showing your peers that your politics are sufficiently anti-colonial. Neither is it useful to think that you have a solid analysis because you use the right words, nor is it useful to present to others – even accidentally – that you think the way you talk is doing something to dispel the reality of settler colonialism in so-called Canada.

Separate from off-the-mark analyses about the language we use in our little subculture having any profound effect on capitalism or civilization, saying “so-called” is, by itself, mostly harmless – up until the point that it becomes a sort of shibboleth by which we determine whether people belong to our in-group or not. So let’s stop doing that!

THE COLONIAL NAME OF MONTRÉAL IN ENGLISH: ACCENT OR NO?

So ai live in Montréal, Québec. That’s the colonial name of this place, of course, but also the name by which the vast majority of people who live around here know this place, and that’s almost certainly even more true for people who don’t live around here, who only know it from photos or maps or tourist guides. The indigenous name of this place, coming from Kanien’kéha, is «Tioh:tiàke» – and ai’m going to talk about that too, though not as much. Ai don’t think ai’d have that much to say about it, anyway, other than: if you live here and you didn’t know that name, you should LEARN IT. NOW!

But first, let’s discuss the colonial name a bit. For simplicity’s sake, ai am just going to talk about the name of the city specifically, but literally everything ai’m about to say applies to the name of the province as well. Basically, there is a widespread understanding that the proper way to write the name of Montréal in English is to do the opposite of what ai’ve been doing in the entirety of this post (and this blog) so far. Instead of including the accent aigu over the letter-ee [e, E], as ai do, you should drop it. Thus, according to the folks that have this understanding, the name of this city should be written “Montreal”.

How widespread is this understanding? It’s hard to say. Let’s imagine someone from Los Angeles goes on vacation to Montréal and writes a blog post about it. Or let’s imagine an English-language author from Mumbai writes an espionage novel that includes a short scene in Montréal for some reason. Or let’s imagine some teenager in Kamloops decides to text her best friend about how she wants to go university in Montréal after high school. Ai am going to guess that none of these people will use an accent aigu, but when it comes to these folks, ai don’t think any of them is likely to have a thought-out position on the proper orthography for this city’s English name. They either don’t care, or they’re using the style that they’re likely to see whenever they look at an atlas or read a tourist guide, or it’s a slight hassle to type that character and they figure the editor can catch it, or whatever. My point is this: while these people might not spell out Montréal’s name with the accent, they don’t necessarily think it absolutely should not be written out with the accent when writing in English.

But the understanding that, indeed, the name of Montréal simply cannot be written with an accent when writing in English is fairly widespread among Canadian anglophones that consider themselves literate and who pride themselves on the professionalism of their emails and the care they put into their spelling. In the areas of Ottawa and Montréal specifically, there are quite a few of these anglophones who, as a part of their job or perhaps as a part of other activities they are involved in, actually find themselves writing emails or other sorts of documents in French quite often; such folks may either use a French-language keyboard all the time, as ai do, or they may have a toggle on their desktop that allows them to switch between French mode and English mode at will.

This understanding is backed up by certain anglophone institutions, too, and the most conspicuous of these are those that have significant connections to Montréal, such as The Gazette (Montréal’s most widely circulated English-language newspaper) and McGill-Queen’s University Press. Both of these institutions produce a lot of material that is read by a lot of people, and the standards they set are bound to be seen as somewhat authoritative.

But me, personally? Ai just don’t get it. For me, at least on one level, this isn’t even really political; it’s simply a matter of what looks good. Let’s consider the first sentence of the Wikipedia article about Projet Montréal for a moment: “Projet Montréal is a municipal political party in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.” If you’re going to add an accent to the first word that needs an accent, why the fuck wouldn’t you add accents to the second and third words? Again, it would be one thing if you were simply lazy and didn’t feel like adding the accents at all, perhaps because your keyboard isn’t set up to make it easy, perhaps because just fuck it. Ai see this all the time in bombastic National Post editorials that talk about “Rene Levesque” or whatever. But if you’re going to take the time to put an accent in one part of the sentence, why not just be consistent?

“Because,” you might be saying, “the accent indicates whether you’re supposedly to pronounce it in an English way or in a French way.”

Okay, fair enough, at least if we’re talking about Montréal – because, of course, this doesn’t apply to the name of the province. Whereas the French pronunciation of Montréal’s name is markedly different from the English pronunciation (notwithstanding the way that the narrator pronounces the name of the city in Street Politics 101, lol), the standard English pronunciation of Québec’s name is identical to the French pronunciation – at least around these parts. Ai’ve heard some Americans say KWI-bek rather than the proper KAY-bek, but hey, they’re Americans!

So yes, in the aforementioned sentence from Wikipedia, the “Montréal” in “Projet Montréal” is supposed to be pronounced mon-RAY-al (in rough phonetic English) and the “Montreal” in “Montreal, Quebec, Canada” is supposed to be pronounced MUN-tree-all (in precise phonetic English). One could definitely argue that the orthographic difference helps to make the difference in pronunciation more clear. But personally, ai feel like it isn’t really necessary, and it leads to some unnecessary ugliness. Maybe this is just me, but when ai read “Montréal” (accented) in an article, ai still pronounce it in my mind like MUN-tree-all. If ai see it next to a word like «projet», ai probably pronounce it differently. This is almost certainly because ai am a pretty word-based person, and because ai know more than a rudimentary bit of French, but ai also don’t think this would be hard to learn for most people. Ai certainly don’t think it would be hard for those pedantic Canadian anglophones who are actually very bilingual but nevertheless insist on an accentless orthography in English.

Now ai’m obviously coming from a place of simply thinking it looks nicer with an accent; in fact, ai like accents in general. Ai think they spice up a sentence, visually speaking. There are some who may say that this aesthetic predilection of mine is not shared by all, and shouldn’t be taken into consideration for design choices, especially when it makes the language somewhat more complicated to read aloud. Such folks are generally in favour of a more phonetic language. But ai don’t buy that shit. If we’re going to try to make written English and spoken English less divergent, there are much more important places to start than the name of this city. Hell, ai would even argue that it’s not such a bad thing for us to be constantly reminded that things don’t necessarily correspond perfectly between text and speech, and that it’s actually fine to be familiar with words in writing without being familiar with how they are actually pronounced. If you know where Shenzhen is on a map, you know that – and can even talk about it – whether you know how to pronounce the name of that city or not.

Ai used the example of a Chinese city in the last paragraph because the rules of Hanyu pinyin, which are actually very consistent and exist in order to make it very easy to pronounce Chinese words, are nevertheless quite non-intuitive for English-speakers who don’t know yet know those rules. Ai happen to be familiar with the rules of this pinyin, so ai can be all smug if ai want to be, but ai don’t consider myself familiar with how Kanien’kéha orthography relates to Kanien’kéha pronunciation. Like, in the word «Kanien’kéha» itself, ai have no idea what the apostrophe is supposed to represent. Ai am sure that it wouldn’t be too hard to learn, but at the moment, ai’m clueless. Nor do ai have any sense of what the colon in «Tioh:tiàke» is supposed to represent pronunciation-wise. For all ai know, these characters could have no impact on pronunciation whatsoever, and are instead there much like the accent aigu in the way ai spell the name of Montréal in English – in other words, there for decoration only. (Ai suspect that this is not the case, but again, ai’m clueless.)

Besides, toponyms seem to be an area of language where there is particular divergence between pronunciation and orthography. Did you know that the name of Kiribati, a country in the Pacific Ocean, is pronounced kee-REE-bus? Assuming you were somewhere in Beaver Empire last October and you were having any decent political conversations at all, did you have any idea about how to properly pronounce the name of Elsipogtog until you heard someone say it out loud to you?

But of course, Montréal is not like these places. It is different. There is, in fact, a narrative that it is a bilingual city, a city that is equally “English” and “French”. Thus, it should have a bilingual name. But again, ai don’t buy this shit. The original colonial settlement was entirely French, and while it later came under British sovereignty, it would have originally been referred to exclusively as “Montréal” – except perhaps by Americans, Englishpeople, and Scots who simply didn’t care to add the accent aigu. After conquest, buildings were built in Montréal that had an accentless MONTREAL engraved on them somewhere, along with other words in English – and ai can only interpret this as a sort of dickishness on the part of anglophones against francophones. Things are very different now from what it was like here in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, obviously, and the local power dynamic between francophone and anglophone has changed enormously. And yet this small, subtle dickishness is now seen as “only natural” by people who will add purely aesthetic accents elsewhere in sentences, as in: “Hey, can the two of us meet up at that cute little Parisian-style café in Old Montreal?”

Language is never natural. Language emerges from decisions that people make.

If we are to use a colonial name for this city at all – and, for the record, ai am open to the idea that we shouldn’t – then ai think it makes sense to just use a single name, to give up on this bilingual shit. The whole “two official languages” thing that the Liberals of the 1960s and ’70s implemented federation-wide is a vapid farce that, despite its total artificiality, has helped to keep the Canadian state together. We should therefore take objection to it.

The implication, for the name of Montréal, is that it doesn’t need two colonial names, one for each official language. It only has one colonial name. Whether you actually care to write that name out or not, ai don’t know. Again, if you’re lazy or you don’t have the right keyboard or you simply give no fucks, that’s all legit. Even if you buy my arguments but would like to keep writing out this city’s name without the accent because you think it’s funny to annoy people who give as much of a fuck about orthography as ai do, well, that’s legit too (though obviously you’re a brat). But if you DO care about writing it out properly, and you’re adding accents to things anyway, then you MAY AS FUCKING WELL add an accent to the name of the city. Ai kind of apply this logic to the Kanieh’kéha name as well. Both on my computer and on my phone, it’s pretty easy for me to add the accented letter (whether the ‘é’ or the ‘à’ in the words ai’ve used in this post), so ai’m gonna do it, cuz that’s how ai roll. Ai am less likely to go to the trouble, though, of using the right characters to spell a Polish or Vietnamese place name that has some intense diacritics going on, and that’s especially true if it’s for, like, a text message to a friend. Like, if ai want to speak about places like Łódź or Hải Phòng City and use the correct characters while doing so, ai pretty much need to copy and paste from Wikipedia.

In conclusion, please do you want, and please don’t feel like ai’m bossing you around. But if you’re making the decision to care about orthography, don’t be selective about it?

TOWARDS A BETTER VOCABULARY OF QUEERNESS IN FRENCH

So in my recent post about my fancy ideas for a gender-neutral pronoun in French, ai mentioned the word «allosexuelle» and made reference to the fact that it never really caught on in French, losing out majorly in competition with the anglicism “queer”.

By itself, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Ai don’t mind if the French language gets “polluted” with anglicisms, although ai’m definitely a bit pedantic about orthography. Let me spell it all out for you: ai would much prefer it if the French version of “queer” became «kuire» instead of «queer», since the French «queer» (you know it’s French because of the guillemets) looks and sounds fucking weird from the perspective of how words are supposed to get together in that language and how they are supposed to be pronounced. The qu– phoneme should be pronounced like a hard letter-kay [k, K] in English, but it isn’t, and ai just plain don’t like that.

Let’s move on, though, to a problem that goes beyond my personal tastes.

To a very large degree, it seems to be more difficult to discuss queerness – which should be understood as something separate from mere homosexuality, something that encompasses a much larger array of subject matter – in French than it is in English, especially if the aim is to discuss it using precise language. Much of that precise language in English is a bit jargonny, to be sure, and that is because it is largely produced by academics and used by university-educated queers. But this language is definitely more jargonny, more impenetrable to the layperson, in French, and that is because so many of the words are anglicisms. A really comprehensive familiarity with the vocabulary basically needs to coincide with a degree of English fluency. And while ai don’t want to generalize too much as an anglo (cuz what do ai know), ai feel like some terms, like “genderfuck”, would pretty much need an entire footnote to explain properly to someone if you only wanted to use French words.

The vocabulary is also more vague in French than it is in English. Among anglophones, it is still common for people to conflate sex and gender with one another. Some people, like webcomic person A. Stiffler, actually say that “in the English language, [‘sex’ and ‘gender’] are essentially similes to each other.” Ai sort of disagree. Although you can definitely make the argument that the larger part of the English-speaking masses haven’t quite internalized the distinction yet, ai’m going to assert that, today, when people conflate sex and gender in English, they are actually making a mistake – just as much as if they had conflated ethics with morality, racism with white supremacy, or queerness with homosexuality. Yet this isn’t the case in French! Even in French academia, the word «sexe» can still refer to both biological sex and gender identity, and this conflation is why «allosexuelle» was, starting in the 1990s, used as a French-language translation of “queer”. There have been efforts to get the word «genre» to refer exclusively to what we call “gender” in English, and «sexe» to refer exclusively to what we call “sex”, but they simply haven’t been very successful so far.

To an anglophone like me, of course, the word «allosexuelle» seems to imply a concern with matters of sexuality in particular, and thus it seems like a poor translation of “queer”, since the things that can be discussed as being queer go far beyond the matter of simple sexual behaviour. A better word might be «allogenric» (grammatically masculine) or «allogenrique» (grammatically feminine), with «genric» and «genrique» being the words ai just made up for the adjectival form of «genre». Still, these two new words I’ve coined aren’t good enough either. They seem to address gender in particular, to the exclusion of sexuality!

It is clear to me that, when it comes down to the wire, neither «allosexuelle» nor the words ai just came up with, «allogenric» and «allogenrique», can replace the anglicism «queer» (which definitely should be changed to «kuire», just sayin’).

This becomes even more true when we consider that «allosexuelle» actually had a prior meaning to its meaning as a French translation for “queer”. Ai didn’t know this until ai was researching this post, but the term was apparently coined in the ’70s by French academics and used as an antonym to «autosexuelle», a word that referred to people who satisfy their sexual needs by themselves. «Allosexuelle» meant the opposite, referring to anyone who satisfies their sexual needs by seeking out others. Interestingly enough, in parts of the anglophone asexual community (something ai have determined from reading this blog post), “allosexual” is now being liberated from its origins in university research and being used once again as an alternative to the term “non-asexual” to refer to people who are, well, not asexual.

Ai will admit that ai had some grand plan of “fixing” the word «allosexuelle» before ai came across the aforementioned blog post; the title of this post was even going to be FIXING ALLOSEXUEL(LE). Essentially, my idea was to separate the concept of allosexuality from queerness, and to try to imbue it with some kind of new meaning that wouldn’t leave it completely redundant among all the other words that have -sexual as a suffix. But ai think my efforts to that end were banal at best, and ai actually think “allosexual”/«allosexuelle» as synonymous with “non-asexual” is pretty good. So can we all collectively agree to start using and understanding that word as such from now on?

Ai mentioned two other words earlier, «allogenric» and «allogenrique»; these were also part of my plan. Essentially, ai thought – in fact, ai think – that these words should be used as French translations for the word “genderqueer”, along with «allogenre», which might be necessary in some contexts as well. Like “genderqueer”, these words refer to a more specific manifestation of queerness. Like, you can have queer sex and yet you might not be genderqueer; that’s a pretty good description of my cis boy self. So yeah. For the record, in English, the word “allogender” looks horrible and so ai don’t think it should be used for any reason ever, especially since “genderqueer” looks great and already exists.

Ai am going to conclude this post with possible French translations for a few more terms that derive from “queer”. First, let’s all translate “queerness” to «kuiritude» (a feminine noun). There’s a good chance that you’re not sold on this new orthography just yet, but come on, «queeritude» is just dumb. If «kuiritude» rubs you the wrong way, you’re probably just better off rocking another anglicism and spelling it out «queerness» in French, i.e. «J’ai écrit un papier sur le concept de queerness quand j’étais un étudiant à l’Université Concordia.»

Next, the verb form of “queer”, as in the passage “[it] queers violence”, something that ai actually had to translate recently in CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ Collective’s “Say You Want an Insurrection”. Ai translated that passage to «[il] rend kuire la violence». So there you have it again: “to queer” is the same as “to render queer”, thus «rendre kuire» if you share my vision or «rendre queer» if you’re boring.

Next, ai mentioned “genderfuck” at one point in this post already, and ai think this is a hard one. On January 12 of this year, there was at an event at La Belle Époque that was entitled, in the January 2014 poster as Genderfuck Art Making in English and Atelier d’art fuck les genres in French. (Ai would have added some dashes, but that’s just me.) Now, while genderfuck can mean “fuck genders”, it also means fucking with genders, which is a subtlety that the translation «fuck-les-genres» (see, it looks better with dashes) serves to erase. Ai feel like this is one of those situations where you might just need to leave it as “genderfuck” if you want it to mean exactly the same thing, since the word just can’t be translated in such a way that it carries all of the same intertwined meanings into the other language. This feeling was pretty much confirmed the other day in a conversation ai had over tea with a francophone friend when we were discussing this language blog ai was intending to launch, who said that the only way to translate this word clearly would be to say «fucker-avec-les-genres» or something equally long, i.e. quelque chose qui ne craque pas, y’know? However, that is boring and/or surrender, and so while ai want to leave it for now, ai would be open to suggestions about how to translate this word.

All of this comes down to an effort to create a French vocabulary of queerness («une vocabulaire pour la kuiritude») as rich as the vocabulary that exists in English, and to make it possible to discuss, in French, a great deal of the “queer theory” that has been produced in English without use of jargon anglicisms (as opposed to common anglicisms, which are widely understood by Québecers and can practically be considered French words by now).

As something of a believer in the validity of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (though that’s a whole other topic), and as a person who thinks the conceptions of sexuality and gender in “queer discourse” in comparison are generally superior to those in to “gay discourse” (i.e. a conception of great fluidity, rather than a conception that is less rigid than the one that exists in heteronormative assumption, but which is still pretty fucking positivist and tends to limit the free expression of the individual quite badly), ai sometimes wonder about stuff. Like, imagining someone very much like myself, but who grows up with queer desires in a small town in Beauce speaking barely any English rather than a small town in south-central New Brunswick speaking barely any French, how is that person going to come to understand sexuality and gender?

There’s a good chance that such a person will do just fine, or suffer a lot of bullshit, or both, but ai think that things improved a lot for me when ai came into contact with the aforementioned “queer discourse” a little bit later in my teenage years and after ai’d moved out of that small town. The words that were suddenly available seemed more useful than the words ai had had before. Ai just wasn’t looking in the right place on the internet, it seems – but how much more difficult would it have been for me to find that shit if it was all written in a language that ai didn’t understand?

Final dictionary entries:

Allosexuality is a noun referring to those who seek and/or desire sexual gratification. It can be contrasted to asexuality. Both allosexual and asexual are both adjective and noun, referring to those who are characterized by allosexuality or asexuality.

French asexualité (f.) for English asexuality.

French allosexualité (f.) for English allosexuality.

French asexuel (or asexuelle, f.) for English asexual.

French allosexuel (or allosexuelle, f.) for English allosexual.

French genric (or genrique, f.) for English adjective gender. (Example: «l’identité genrique» for “gender identity”.)

French allogenre (probably, and problematically from a grammar perspective, neutral) for English countable noun genderqueer.

French allogenric (or allogenrique, f.; allogenre, n.) for English adjective genderqueer.

French kuir (or kuire, f.) for English queer (both noun and adjective).

French rendre kuir (or rendre kuire when applied to feminine object) for English verb to queer.

French kuiritude (f.) for English queerness.

TRANSLATING THE NAME OF INDIVIDUALIDADES TENDIENDO A LO SALVAJE

SPOILER ALERT. This post contains a reference to a minor plot point near the end
of Watchmen, so if you haven't read the novel or watched the movie yet, go read
the novel! (Do NOT watch the movie first. The special effects are cool, though.)

This is an unsolicited opinion, and not necessarily the best-informed opinion, either. Ai can neither speak nor write Castilian, and my ability to read it or understand it when it is spoken is extremely limited at best, so let’s just acknowledge that right away.

A friend gave me a copy of the The Collected Communiques of Individualists Tending Toward the Wild in late 2012. The book, produced by Plain Words, is exactly what it sounds like. It comprises the first six communiqués released by Individualidades tendiendo a lo salvaje (ITS), an entity that made quite a splash with its Unabomber-inspired parcel bomb attacks against specific individuals in Mexico, namely those that are seen to be most responsible for helping to progress the conquest of wilderness by civilization. These communiqués were translated from Castilian into English by War On Society (WOS). It also contains five appendices, one of which is a chronology of relevant events in Mexico from December 2010 to January 2012, and the other four being communiqués or statements that were also released over the course of 2011, three of them by entities in Mexico and one of them by an entity in Chile. On top of all that, there is an introduction by Plain Words and a note on the translation by WOS. This note on the translation, or at least part of it, is what interests me.

Over half of the note is dedicated to what WOS calls “translation decisions that are worth mentioning”, and three out of the four paragraphs about these decisions are dedicated to the name of the entity itself. “Among the thousands of words penned by the group,” WOS writes, “their name remains the most difficult to translate.” Each of the three paragraphs is focused on a different part of the name: first, the word «individualidades», then «tendiendo a», then finally «lo salvaje». For the first part and the last part, the reasoning is provided for the choice about why the specific English terms “individualists” and “the wild” were used in the translated title, while for «tendiendo a», it is simply explained that the reader should keep in mind that the Castilian original doesn’t convey the wishy-washyness that the English word “tending” might seem to imply. In the end, WOS opts for “Individualists Tending Toward the Wild” as an appropriate translation.

Ai take less issue with the use of the English term “the wild” for the Castilian original «lo salvaje» than WOS itself seems to. Apparently ITS’ use of «salvaje» instead of the alternative «silvestre» might seem to imply an identification with the violent and chaotic aspect of wild nature; as a result, WOS says that it is “probably erring on the side of too much softness” with its use of the word “wild” instead of “savage”, a choice that WOS says is motivated by a desire to avoid “the racial connotations” of the word “savage”. For me, though, ai think the use of the term “the wild” would be appropriate even if we set aside the concerns about the offensive connotations of the word “savage” in English. It would be confusing as all fuck to speak of “individualists tending toward the savage”; we would probably be better off to speak of “tending toward the ferocious”, but then we’d be getting into even more tenuous territory. Another alternative is to speak of “tending toward savagery”, but then ITS’ name would probably incorporate either the word «salvajismo» or «salvajada», which are more direct Castilian correlates to “savagery”.

Ai do take issue, though, with the transformation of the Castilian «individualidades» into the English “individualists”. WOS acknowledges in its note on translation that the Castilian «individualidades» does not actually correspond with the English “individualists”; the actual term would be «individualistxs» (using the common style of feminization in Castilian that involves using a letter-ex [x, X] in place of a feminine letter-ae [a, A] or a masculine letter-oh [o, O]), a term that ITS never uses to describe itself. But WOS opts for the term “individualists” anyway because “it conveys an aspect of the group’s thought-action that distinguishes them from most other anti-technology warriors” and because “the group clearly expresses individualist positions in their writings and practice.” This reasoning seems weak, to me at least, and ai think it amounts to a failure to find an appropriate word in English for «individualidades». Ai think ai have found such a word, but first, ai want to get into the details of why the use of the word “individualists” is inappropriate.

Ai think it’s pretty fair to associate ITS with tendencies within anarchism that are labelled egoist or anarchist, but they make it clear in their communiqués that they reject the anarchist tradition outright. To speak of “individualists”, though, and to use that word with political/ideological content (rather than simply speaking of an individualist personality, something which may not have anything to do with a person’s politics), is to speak of anarchists. There is no other tendency or camp outside of anarchism that can be described as “individualists”, and thus, even if individualists may be harshly critical of much of what comprises the anarchist tradition or anarchism today, they remain within the anarchist fold. ITS, on the other hand, is decidedly outside of that fold.

Ai have, of course, made an overly general statement, because ai have no doubt that there are those who consider themselves individualists without considering themselves anarchists – whose individualism owes a great deal to the same people that the egoist/individualist tendencies draw from, but who have nonetheless made a comprehensive break (at least on the level of words) with what they see as both essentially anarchist and essentially problematic. Yet such people are a small minority, and ITS is not among their number because ITS does not describe itself as individualist. Ai think it is also fair to say that ITS, unlike the hypothetical non-anarchist individualists ai just described, also has an analysis that is informed by much more than anarchist egoism and individualism.

So ai don’t think it’s appropriate to describe ITS as individualist even if we can infer the influence of individualist analysis in their writings – and as for what we can infer from their practice, ai am skeptical that we can infer any individualism at all, since their tactics are not the sole property of individualists and since individualists have also opted for very different tactics in the past. As for the points about the term “individualists” conveying something about their thought-action that distinguishes them from other anti-technology warriors, ai would argue that it does nothing of the sort. Yes, there are many anti-techology warriors (to continue using the term used by WOS) that could be considered more collectivist (i.e. non-individualist or anti-individualist), and ITS is clearly different from them. But, at the same time, there are plenty of anti-technology warriors that do identify themselves with anarchist individualism (and often speak disparagingly of collectivism, leftism, etc.). The use of the word “individualists” in the translation of ITS’ name has the effect of unnecessarily conflating ITS with these groups.

Ai would go in for a different English name: Singularities Tending Toward the Wild.

The word «individualidades» could be rendered “individualities” in English, but this isn’t a very intuitive translation. We rarely, if ever, pluralize the word “individuality”, which is usually seen to refer to a person’s special uniqueness or whatever. This special uniqueness (lol) is very different from whatever ITS is trying to convey about itself in its name, since individuality refers to an aspect of the individual, yet ITS is speaking of the entire self of those involved as comprising an individuality. Ai think that this meaning could be conveyed better with the word “singularity” if we take this word for the specialized meaning it has developed within certain circles.

In Watchmen, Jon Osterman (Dr. Manhattan) comes a certain conclusion about humans just before he leaves Mars and goes back to Earth with Laurie (in order to save the human species or whatever). Specifically, he concludes that life on Earth is worth saving because it continuously, and consistently, produces completely unique creatures like Laurie. This is different from, say, the non-living forces on Mars that are also marvellous, but which don’t produce things without precedent, which we can also think of as “singularities”.

Ai am a singularity and so are you. Ai am a unique, unprecedented thing, something that can’t (yet) be fit neatly in any rational, orderly model of reality and its functioning – and so are you. But, as a singularity, characteristics can still be ascribed to me (and to you). What are these characteristics, though? Well, that’s a big question, but when it comes to ITS, we know that one characteristic they are ascribing to themselves is their tendency towards the wild.

This is, of course, a somewhat hokey proposal, and probably born of a fondness ai have for a particularly amusing graffito – one that read simply, in English, SINGULARITIES IN REVOLT – that existed on a wall in Montréal’s Southwest in 2009, and which me and my friends liked to talk about. Although ai am proposing it because ai actually think it makes sense as a translation, ai would, in order to hedge my argument, propose that, at the very least, it makes more sense than using the word “individualists” since it does not ascribe to ITS a politics that they never claim and which they probably reject.

Please note: ai have opinions about ITS, but this was not a post about those opinions. Pretty strong ones, actually. This was a post about how to render their name in English, and that is all. If you want the opinions, you should just talk to me.

And please note further: ai, as somewhat of a pedantic person who spends a lot of time thinking about these things, have come to a different conclusion than WOS as to how we should translate the name of ITS in English. This should be expected; translators are definitely going to disagree with each other. This post should not, however, be understood as a critique of WOS’ project, because it is my position that they have done the English-speaking world a great service by translating these texts into English. That’s because ai think the ideas of ITS should be, at the very least, of interest to people all over the world. Regardless of how much we accept, or don’t accept, those ideas as our own, their critique, backed up by their actions, constitute a challenge to prevailing attitudes that no one living in the civilized world should have the privilege to ignore.

THINGS THAT BOTHER ME ABOUT FRENCH, pt. 1: «AU-DESSUS» & «AU-DESSOUS»

So, «au-dessus» and «au-dessous».

For all ye French-incapable anglos, the first of these words means “on top” and the second means “underneath”. As you can see, there is only a single letter that distinguishes the two on an orthographic level, and if we only use sounds that make intuitive sense to anglos, they would both have to be rendered into phonetic English in the same way: oh dessoo.

There is, in fact, a difference in how the two are pronounced, but it is too subtle for anglophones to pick up unless they are familiar with languages that train their speakers to hear such a difference. This is definitely something that contributes to my frustration about these two words in particular. As far as ai can recall, during the entire nine years that some or most of my education took place in French, no one ever informed me that, to pronounce the sound that corresponds to the letter-yu [u, U] by itself in French, you must purse your lips as if you’re about to say ooooo, then leave your lips in that position while otherwise using your mouth parts (mostly your tongue) to try to make the sound eeeee.

This isn’t a sound that gets produced in English very much, or at least not in the varieties of English that we speak in these parts. It’s a sound that an anglophone with average hearing ability can recognize and distinguish from other sounds, like any other sound, but unless we have been specifically trained to do so, we don’t – and such a training isn’t a part of our normal language acquisition. As a result, whenever we hear a sound like this, we are likely to lump it in with other sounds that we are trained to hear.

Bit of a tangent here: when ai was in university, ai took a Putonghua (i.e. standard Mandarin Chinese) class, and ai learned on the very first day of that class that Putonghua has six distinct vowels. In pinyin, they correspond with the characters Aa, Ee, Ii, Oo, Uu, and Üü. My professor – again, on the very first day – explained that the one with the umlaut there is pronounced by having your lips make an ooooo but having your tongue make an eeeee. She must have said it in about as many words as that. Ai was able to pronounce this sound well enough by my second class, and ai think that this was also true for my anglophone classmates in general (because there was a native Korean speaker, a native Dzongkha speaker, and possibly a few other non-anglophones in the class as well).

The approach of my Putonghua professor should be compared and contrasted to how ai learned French in middle school and high school. Although ai had been taking “Core French” since Grade Three, it’s in Grade Six that ai was taken out of New Brunswick’s standard English curriculum and put into the province’s French immersion curriculum for anglos. What this means is that, at ten years old, after a decade of speaking only English with my unilingual parents and siblings and living in an overwhelmingly anglophone community (there were more kids in my high school that spoke German with their parents than there were kids who spoke French), ai was now going to have four out of five classes a day in French. There are all sorts of problems to this approach, but one major problem is that ai was well past the point where my brain might be plastic enough for me to pick up on, by myself, the subtle difference between the sounds designated as Uu and Üü in pinyin.

In other words, ai could not distinguish between that sound, as in «au-dessus» (or «but» or «rue»), and the sound in «au-dessous» (or «bout» or «roux»). To me, it all just corresponded with the sound that exists in English words like “moon”, “true”, and “cool”. That’s where ai was at – and unless someone was going to call my attention to the difference and provide concrete tips about how to improve my pronunciation, such as by telling me where my tongue should be if ai want to pronounce the Üü sound correctly – that’s where ai was going to stay. This isn’t something that any of my French teachers, neither the anglophones nor the francophones, seem to have understood.

It’s only in the summer of 2013 (almost four years into my Montréal life) that ai finally learned the difference. Ai was having breakfast with some franco buddies and talking shit about their mother tongue, as ai am wont to do, and ai brought up «au-dessus» and «au-dessous», two words that baffled me completely. “How do you know the difference unless it’s written down?” ai asked. They explained the shit with the tongues. They subsequently explained that whenever ai had thought ai was talking about “the streets” (as ai am also wont to do), ai had actually been talking about “the red-headed men”. And it is during this conversation that ai realized ai already knew about this sound, that ai could already pronounce it because ai had shown up for day one of Putonghua class. This actually seemed to surprise them a bit, since they were telling me and the other anglo having breakfast that “it’s okay, we understand you, you don’t have that sound in English.”

You would think, though, that now that ai have been enlightened as to the difference in pronunciation, these words would no longer bother me as much as they used to? Well, you would be wrong! These words are still unnecessarily similar, and there isn’t even a reason that makes any intuitive sense. That is because, while the more basic word for “under” is «sous», the more basic word for «on» is “sur”. It isn’t «sus» with a letter-ess [s, S], but «sur» with a letter-arr [r, R]. So why isn’t the word «au-dessur»? Even if your tongue is as clumsy and anglo as it can be, even if no one has told you how to pronounce the French letter-yu correctly (or the French letter-arr, for that matter), «au-dessur» would at least allow you to answer clearly, in as good a French as you can muster, a two-possible-answers question as to which sex position you prefer.

Let’s imagine a person who can’t pronounce the letter-yu or the letter-arr in French. Let’s name this person Anglo Pete. Here is his phonetically rendered answer to the sex position question: «Je préfaire le sexe au-dessoure!» It’s pretty poor, no doubt, but it meets the requirements for comprehensibility.

Now ai’m not saying that «au-dessus» needs to be changed to «au-dessur». It’s just that this particular convention seems like something that is designed to be difficult for anglophones, and as an anglo, ai just don’t appreciate it. This comes out of my belief that French should be easier for non-francophones, including anglos, to learn.

Final story: the day after ai learned the difference between «au-dessous» and «au-dessus», ai felt like ai had become aware of a great secret, something that granted me strange new powers and/or prestige. Drunk as if under the influence of the Ring to Rule Them All, ai told three anglos whose minds were also blown, including one who grew up in Québec but went to English-language schools his whole life. The whole thing was just crazy. The fourth anglo ai told was not very impressed, perhaps because he had actually been in a French-language school since kindergarten, so ai think ai stopped then. Truly my life will be the stuff of folk tales someday.

TRANSLATING “SETTLER COLONIALISM” INTO FRENCH

Settler colonialism (or settler-colonialism with a dash) is an English-language term that refers to a specific kind of colonialism without necessarily making any comment on the other kinds of colonialism that exist or what they might look like. By itself, colonialism is a very vague concept, like many other terms that are used frequently in anarchist, radical left, and onkwehón:we sovereigntist circles in the part of Turtle Island occupied and claimed by the Canadian state – and ai will address this vagueness in short order. Settler colonialism, on the other hand, is a concept imbued with much more substance and consistency (which ai will also elaborate upon!), and it is therefore an important part of the anarchist lexicon.

Unfortunately, for anarchists who speak French (on the regular or just once in a while), there isn’t any obvious way to translate it into their language, and that’s because the common French word for “settler” is «colonne». So the straightforward translation is «colonialisme-colon», which both sounds stupid and doesn’t convey anything different about this colonialism versus other colonialisms.

The thing that makes settler colonialism different, of course, is settlement. There is no precise French equivalent for this word, but there is «peuplement», which literally refers to “peopling” an area. Settler colonialism is the culture, the ideology, and the political structure that is produced by, and then serves to reproduce, any society that emerged from the population infusion of settlers – people who are not indigenous to the land, and who are also indoctrinated in the culture, or at least the routines, of a state and a civilization – into territory that, up until that point, was either outside of the state’s control completely or in which the state was only present in a military sense, not a civilian one. The first wave of settlement often served as the society’s great act of foundational violence, as it did in Canada, the United States, and plenty of other places.

Neither the English word “peopling” nor its French correlate are appropriate to describe this particular sort of population infusion from one place to another place. First, this word can just as easily refer to a process of human population growth that did not have a colonial character to it (for example, “the peopling of Thailand“, or even the peopling of Hiroshima and Nagasaki over the years since 1945) as it can to an influx of European or other settlers into an area. This is definitely a bit confusing, and there is also a fatal flaw: the words “peopling” and «peuplement» imply that there were no people in the area before this “peopling” or «peuplement» began. In a very small number of cases, like some islands in the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans (such as Tristan de Cunha, Mauritius, and the Falklands), the islands were uninhabited when they were first sighted by Europeans, but in most other cases, this was not true – yet the historiography and mythology of Western civilization is rife with lies to the contrary, most infamously with reference to the continent of Australia. It seems to me that the use of “peopling” or its French correlate would be a perpetuation, if a very small one, of the pernicious narrative of terra nullius, and that doing so should therefore be avoided. Besides, how the hell would you make «peuplement» into an adjective that could sit alongside «colonialisme» and not have the resulting term look completely ridiculous?

For the record, the word “settlement” itself is rather politically neutral as well, and there’s a reason that we, as anarchists, speak of the colonization of the Americas rather than, as Wikipedia does, the settlement of the Americas. If ai told you ai was gonna settle somewhere else, you might just think ai’m moving to Toronto. If ai told you to settle down, you would take that to mean ai want you to act calmer. A settlement is simply a place where people live, and hell, even onkwehón:we people have their own settlements, like the Unist’ot’en Camp out West, the Zapatista communities in the Selva Lacandona, and the sites of “productive recovery” on the frontlines of Wallmapu and Chile. To properly speak of this process of five hundred years of extermination and assimilation of onkwehón:we peoples (read: genocide), the only term we can really use is “colonization”/«colonisation». These words have been imbued with violence, even if they can still also refer to politically neutral situations (like the colonization of newly exposed volcanic rock by lichen spores). To speak of colonization in a political conversation is to evoke the clash between the colonizer (the invader) and the colonized or would-be colonized (the indigenous).

So, while “settlement” is an inappropriate word for this population infusion process and the corollary war, genocide, enslavement, hierarchization, and displacement, its adjectival form is a necessary prefix to “colonialism” for the purposes of describing the political situation where ai live as well as many other places, from Kurdistan to the Russian Far East, from Tibet to Cascadia, from the Holy Land to Tierra del Fuego.

Personally, ai’d go even further and say that the concept of colonialism is, by itself, actually too vague to say very much about any situation that currently exists on Earth. The situations that have been named as examples of colonialism are incredibly diverse. They range from situations where colonization was led by an imperial state to situations where settlers initially acted in defiance of their own sovereign’s laws, but also to situations where indigenous authorities were vassalized by the more powerful state, or became willing partners in a world economy that generally benefited the people of the imperial centres more than the peripheries, or whatever else – in these latter cases, situations that generally didn’t involve significant population infusions or large-scale displacements of indigenous people with settlers (as opposed to displacements in general, which are probably happening pretty much anywhere that capitalism is happening). In many parts of Africa and Asia, the sovereign state headquartered in Europe was only present in a military sense (and even then, many of the coercive functions of the state would often be devolved to local monarchs and their employees) and wealth extraction activities conducted by state-owned or private firms did not require permanent settlement by Europeans.

This isn’t to say that the word “colonialism” is meaningless – it obviously isn’t – but by itself, it isn’t very descriptive. The word “settler” adds substance to the word “colonialism” by implying a population infusion. Settler colonialism, while looking different in different contexts, is something that seems to have some consistent qualities no matter where you look, although the purpose of this post isn’t to detail these. Instead, the question ai want to ask is what word formation can allow us to speak about settler colonialism in the French language more effectively?

My proposal is «le colonialisme-habitant». This suffix implies continuing to live in a place, as opposed to making reference to the original act of arrival like “settlement” does – but that’s fine, since it is still a colonialism that has successfully infused an area with a population of state subjects that can sustain and perpetuate itself.

The English adjectival form is settler-colonial, which, unlike the noun form, should always use a dash. In French, to take a somewhat more cyberpunk aesthetic approach, ai would propose the adjectival forms of «habcolonial» (for masculine nouns) and «habcoloniale» (for feminine) rather than the somewhat unwieldy «colonial-habitant» and its feminine counterpart. Of course, in many instances, context is going to allow for the shorthand use of “colonial”/«coloniale», or possibly «colonialiste» in French. (The English word “colonialist” is terribly ugly, and ai am pretty firmly against it. Ai’m honestly not a huge fan of «colonialiste» either, but you need it for the rhyme scheme in the chant A – ANTI – ANTI-COLONIALISTE! SOLIDARITÉ AVEC LES INNUES QUI RÉSISTENT!, so it gets a grudging pass in my book.)

A settler, of course, cannot simply be a «habitant» (if male) or a «habitante» (if female) in French; this is, once again, an inappropriately neutral word, for ai am a «habitant» of my apartment, and so are many onkwehón:we people in their own respective apartments. The words that are already being used, «colon» and «colonne», are absolutely fine. Of course, if it was ever necessary to make things more precise for some reason, one could easily write out «colonne-habitante».

Final dictionary entries:

Settler colonialism (alternative form: settler-colonialism) is a noun, usually uncountable but to be counted with the plural form settler colonialisms (or settler-colonialisms) when necessary. The adjectival form is settler-colonial. These words refer to the culture, ideology, and political order produced by, or serving to reproduce, a society whose foundational act of violence was the colonization of an area heretofore outside of a given state’s control by that state’s subjects.

Settler is a noun, countable with the plural form settlers. It refers to any participant, willing or unwilling, in a settler-colonial society, starting with the first settlers and continuing through successive generations.

French colonialisme-habitant (m.) for English settler colonialism.

French habcolonial (or habcoloniale, f.) for English settler-colonial.

French colon (or colonne, f.) for English settler.

French colons (or colonnes, f.) for English settlers.

A GENDER-NEUTRAL PRONOUN IN FRENCH?

Ai propose to you, dear reader, «ale» – plural form being «ales».

The word derives from the prefix allo-. These two syllables are affixed to the words for the categories of stuff that are other from, apart from, and/or aloof from the categories of stuff that are considered most important by the dominant sources of metanarrative production in our society (what ai like to call “the dessemp”, based on the acronym DSMP).

For example, Québec’s allophones, who are not perceived as those with the most agency or the most responsibility in the conflict between the Province of Québec’s official French unilingualism, on the one hand, and the threat of «le bilinguisme grimpant» and/or English-language hegemony, on the other. Then there’s the word «allosexuelle», a French translation of “queer” that never really caught on. It sounds a bit clinical, for sure, and it’s pretty obvious why it couldn’t compete with that sexy single-syllable anglicism that has swept the world (or at least a large number of European languages). Right now, though, in this paragraph here, ai’d like us all to appreciate «allosexuelle» for what it is. Ai think it implies a certain vastness, one as diverse and far-reaching as the human animal’s propensity for creativity, experimentation, desire, and resourcefulness. It’s not infinite, but for limited subjectivities like ourselves, it is effectively so. (EDIT: while the main thrust of this paragraph remains relevant, research done for a later post revealed some important information about the word «allosexuelle» which is probably worth looking into).

My motivation here, for the record, is that ai want to have a French word that ai, myself, can feel comfortable using to refer to the people in my life who, in English, prefer to use they as a personal pronoun. Ai don’t feel comfortable using «il», ai don’t like the gendered «lui» (as opposed to the non-gendered «lui» that you can also use for someone who is otherwise an «elle» – such is the intricacy of proper French grammar), and ai don’t like the needlessly ugly and binary-affirming «ille». It doesn’t seem like any of the other gender-neutral pronouns ai’ve seen (all of which come from this blog post, incidentally) have caught on very much, and ai don’t like any of them anyway.

The sort of go-to in Montréal, at least among the small number of people that ai’ve ever had this conversation with, is to use «ille», which you may notice ai just shit-talked in the last paragraph.

Ai came up with «ale» because «ille» is terribly inadequate as a when-in-doubt pronoun. To be clear, if someone told me to use «ille» when referring to them, ai would do so, just as ai have used “e”, “ze”, and even “it” in English when people have told me that such or such is the pronoun that so or so uses. But in English, if ai’m uncertain about someone’s preferred pronoun and ai can’t just find out easily, ai’m going to use “they”. It seems to me that «ille» isn’t appropriate for this same function, though, because of a few reasons. First, «ille» sounds pretty much the same as the masculine pronoun in French unless you really stress the final letter-ee [e, E] and get another syllable out of it, like you might do for certain chants or songs. That sounds a bit weird in regular speech, though, and it’s still going to sound pretty much the same as «il». Second, the orthography of «ille» is simply a cross between «il» and «elle». There is an implication here that the person to whom this pronoun refers is simply between masculinity and femininity, rather than completely beyond the two of them. It is entirely possible that the person in question does feel “in between the two” (or feels like an embodiment of the two, or whatever other subjective experience they might have of their gender), but it’s also possible that they don’t, and frankly, ai am rather unlikely to know for sure. Once again, it’s subjective!

Ai like to think, though, that «ale», in contrast to «ille», is closer to «hen», the Swedish gender-neutral pronoun that has been generating a lot of controversy in some circles as of late. Like «hen», «ale» has a different vowel sound than its masculine and feminine counterparts (which, in Swedish, are «han» and «hon» respectively), but the word has the same consonant structure, so it doesn’t look completely out of place alongside the other two. In French, of course, the orthography is also a bit different between the masculine and feminine pronouns, with «il» having two letters and «elle» coming in at four. «Ale» has three letters. There is a risk, of course, that it will look like it is “in between” masculinity and femininity because of this, an apparent compromise that ai don’t like about «ille» and something ai want to avoid. But hopefully ai’m reading too much into it, and no one else will care! The purpose of the three letters is to render it different enough in form from both of the predominating pronouns, not necessarily to be “in between”.

So the final thing here is finding a word that corresponds to «ale» for those situations where «lui» is not epicene. In this case, ai am not sure if ai should propose another word formation in order to differentiate «ale» even further from the predominating pronouns (using, for example, «aule»?) or if it’d be better to go with the standard that is set by «elle». It’s basically a question of whether «lui-même» (“himself”) and «elle-même» (“herself), and all other situations of this kind, will be joined with the obvious «ale-même», or with the alternative «aule-même». Considering that ai can’t actually speak French properly, ai doubt it’ll be much of a problem for me, but there should be a standard, and considering that ai can’t decide between the two, ai am going to unilaterally propose that both are appropriate!

Of course, the introduction of a gender-neutral pronoun doesn’t resolve the problem of adjectives which, in French, can have either of two genders, masculine or feminine. Short of making a new version of each adjective that corresponds to a third grammatical gender, which is an absolutely daunting task, the only solution seems to be for people who use neither masculine nor feminine pronouns to simply pick an adjectival form they feel more comfortable with. In many cases, the adjectival forms are not going to matter too much, at least when spoken, because the difference in pronunciation is very subtle. It is going to be more difficult in cases where the masculine and feminine versions of the same word are markedly different from one another in both pronunciation and orthography, as with the words «beau» and «belle».

Today, many English-speaking anarchists ask for and offer pronouns when in the midst of introductions. Ai think this cultural practice is good and useful, and ai think it would be nice if this practice could be imported to French-speaking anarchist scenes too. In French, though, due to this matter of gendered adjectives – something that, at least as far as ai can see it, can’t be torn down or reformed without a total negation of the French language itself – introductions may sometimes need to include the question «Et c’est quoi ta forme adjectivale préférée?» after name and pronoun come up. This may not be necessary if a person has already told you that their preferred pronoun is «elle» or «il», but for someone who uses «ale» (or whatever other gender-neutral pronoun, since there’s no guarantee that the one a cis boy anglo came up with is the one that will eventually actually catch on), it is definitely pertinent information.

Of course, asking for adjectival forms in English might not be a bad idea either, at least if you live in a city where the French language predominates. Ai might be anglo, and you might be anglo, and so you might think that ai don’t need a preferred adjectival form since we’ll be speaking to each other in English, but there’s a chance that ai’m going to have a conversation about you (using adjectives!) with a francophone later. If ai don’t have know what to do, ai’m going to be staring at my phone, trying to tell someone that you are “determined” or something (in French, either «déterminé» or «déterminée»), not knowing whether ai should add that extra letter-ee to my text or not, and generally freaking the fuck out.

(This has actually happened, although “freaking the fuck out” is a bit of an exaggeration.)

So here’s my proposal, once again, in a nutshell. Unless another French gender-neutral pronoun has been specified as appropriate (for example, «ille», which some people do prefer), use «ale» when referring to people for whom you would use the singular “they” (or any other gender-neutral pronoun) if you were speaking in English. Use «ale» when referring to someone whose gender identity you do not know, in the same way as you would use “they”. Bring the practice of asking for pronouns to the other solitude, and when necessary, ask for adjectival forms as well. Expect some confusion, but do it anyway, because it’s a good thing to do.

In any case, whatever you choose to do yourself, you’ll now know what I’m talking about if you ever hear me say «ale».

BONJOUR/HI IS A STUPID SALUTATION

If you go shopping in downtown Montréal, or if you want to buy a coffee at Second Cup or a burger at McDonald’s, there is a very good chance that the first word out of the mouth of the employee who greets you will be be «bonjour», the second “hi”. This construction, bonjour/hi, is possibly unique to Montréal, although ai wouldn’t rule out that it gets used in Sherbrooke or the North Outaouais as well, and maybe even in some francophone parts of Ontario.

As of the last time we heard from them, the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) doesn’t like it when cashiers, bank tellers, receptionists, wait staff, or people trying to sell electronics for commission at Future Shop use bonjour/hi to greet customers/potential sources of revenue/unpleasant people that the wage system obligates them to interact with. The OQLF would prefer a simple bonjour, thank you very much.

In the spring of 2012, the Office released a series of studies that included the claim that the use of bonjour/hi had increased by 1300% in the period of time between 2010 and 2012. Louise Marchand, who was president of the OQLF from 2010 until her scandal-driven resignation in 2013, said around the time of the report’s release that «ce n’est pas une infraction à la Charte [de la langue française], mais ça peut contribuer au sentiment que Montréal s’anglicise.» And that would be a problem.

At some point, ai’d like to write a longer post about this phenomenon called “the anglicization of Montréal”, whether it’s actually happening or not, and what it actually matters to anything. But that can wait. For now, ai would like to direct most of my vitriol to those good Canadian citizens that have rushed to bonjour/hi’s defense. For these people, bonjour/hi is “that familiar and uniquely Montréal greeting” that stands as a true testament to everything that Canada is supposed to be.

As for me, ai hate bonjour/hi. Let me name the reasons.

#1. It isn’t a single salutation, but two. It’s like saying hello/good day or bonjour/salut. That might be fine in some cases, but as a constant go-to? And this isn’t even very similar to a common greeting like “hey, what’s up?”, either. It’s not a salutation followed by a friendly and perhaps irrelevant question. It is just two greetings. There is no need for this.

#2. The word «bonjour», by itself, simple means “good day”. First of all, ai just think this sounds silly, and secondly, it sounds British to me. It always has, ever since ai started learning this language in Grade Three. If there were five defining characteristics of what it means to be Québécois, being opposed to all things Britannic would be among them – so this has always struck me as a bit strange, even if ai realize that it obviously isn’t a translation of the British greeting. Perhaps it’s less that it sounds British specifically, and more that it sounds European generally. In any case, ai don’t like it, whether by itself or as part of a bonjour/hi.

#3. The only person who would ever say bonjour/hi to me is someone who wants to sell me something, or someone who works for someone who wants to sell me something. It reeks of artificiality. This is not some innocent collision of two languages. Bonjour/hi is borne of an intentional effort to appease both Québécois nationalists and anglo chauvinists who are so fucking stuffy about being spoken to in the right language that they might just take their loonies and toonies to another bread-and-tomato-sauce establishment if you fuck up the greeting. Sadly, such people actually exist, and they are obviously annoying as all fuck, but the point is that bonjour/hi only exists to get money out of people – and thus it is totally inappropriate except when you have to deal with pricks. No one says bonjour/hi at a fucking house party! No one says bonjour/hi when they’re meeting their neighbours for the first time!

#4. There is a significantly better greeting available in French, a word that can be used in English as well: «salut». When there is this greeting available, which is so musical and nice, why would anyone ever use the shitty other one?

Ai am going to stress this last one again. When ai go to the small fruiterie near my house, the cashier usually says salut to me, whether it’s the cashier that likes to make small talk with me in French, the one who likes to make small talk in English (sometimes), or one of the cashiers who has never expressed interest in talking to me. If there’s any greeting that the self-proclaimed champions of Montréal English should be stoked on, it’s salut.

There is a possibility that someday, perhaps someday soon, ai will be forced to get a job at a Tim Hortons or some other shithole, and it is quite possible that my boss will thereafter inform me that ai must greet every coffee drinker and donut eater with a fucking bonjour/hi. At that point, as much as ai hate the likes of Louise Marchand, Mario Beaulieu, and other anglophobes, ai will be tempted to call up the OQLF or the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste or someone, and then ask them to picket my store until ai can say salut like ai want to.

“AI” – AN ALTERNATIVE FIRST-PERSON PERSONAL PRONOUN IN ENGLISH

Years ago, on an English-language primitivist internet forum ai would occasionally lurk, there was a user who never used the standard capital letter-ai [i, I] for their first-person personal pronoun. Instead, they wrote out “ai”. This word followed standard capitalization rules, only getting capitalized at the beginning of sentences. In other words, it was pretty much the same as «je», the first-person personal pronoun in French.

This user intrigued me. In fact, for some time after, on and off from 2009 to 2011 or so, ai used the same form for my own first-person personal pronoun – and ai have decided that ai am going to use this form again for this blog.

As a lurker on that forum, who never even signed up for an account, ai never had a conversation with that original user about the logic behind their use of this pronoun. The thing that interested me, and that still interests me, may not have anything to do with their logic. It’s also entirely possible that, unlike myself, that user didn’t understand “ai” to have an identical pronunciation to “I”. They might have thought it was pronounced like ay or something. For me, though, it seems clear that “ai” is supposed to be pronounced in the same way as those two letters would be in the English transliteration of Japanese or Chinese words – as a homonym to “eye” and “I”. This means that the phrases “I ate a sandwich” and “ai ate a sandwich” are homophonic when spoken, even if the orthography is slightly different.

Ai am a fan of this orthographic shift, and this is because, on a symbolic level, ai really don’t like the standard form of the first-person personal pronoun in English, the capital letter-ai. First off, it looks phallic to me. It also looks like a tower – a structure that is cut off from the surrounding world, that alienates whoever is on top of it from the rest of what’s going on around. These are throwaway criticisms, of course, but it also strikes me as strange that it is one of only two words in the English language that consists of a single letter, and that, unlike the other word in that category, “a”, it is always capitalized.

While this can certainly be explained as simply a spelling convention that is used, it is also undeniable that, in many (most?) European languages, the capitalization of certain words can be understood to convey greater importance to the things those words describe in comparison to other words. There is certainly a reason why, in anarchist, radical left, and onkwehón:we sovereigntist circles, writers and propagandists will often conspicuously capitalize certain words (like “Black”, “Indigenous”, even “Anarchism” sometimes) and just as conspicuously choose not to capitalize certain other words (like “canada”, “the u.s.”, “european”, “marxist”). Ai would argue that the first-person personal pronoun’s consistent capitalization in English has the effect of symbolically valorizing the individual, and ai think it is worth changing for precisely that reason, especially if there is another option available to us.

Please note: ai’m not arguing that we need to switch over to “ai” because the current form has some kind of powerful psychological effect on the unconscious mind of all anglophones. The problem is symbolic, and that is it. Ai can imagine others thinking of me as a similar sort of conspiracist who believes that this spelling convention was set long ago by decided partisans of egocentric patriarchy, and that ai think they are socializing us, brainwashing us, to be like them through their orthographic evil – something that ai personally must stop! So that would be funny, but really, it’s simply a matter of the orthography conflicting with my values in pretty much the same way as the existence of an avenue Christophe-Colomb in my city conflicts with my values.

What ai mean is this: ai don’t think it matters much, but ai’d still rather that the situation be different. It’s not that the status quo – in either the case of the first-person personal pronoun being a capital letter-ai or the case of avenue Christophe-Colomb simply existing – directly does anything to reinforce things that are bad in this society. That said, ai do think that changing the situation, or trying to, might have a positive effect in terms of calling attention to a problem.

That positive effect might be very small, but hey, it would at least make me feel better! And perhaps some other people too.

There needs to be a viable alternative to the previously existing standard, though. In the case of avenue Christophe-Colomb, it’s easy: just name it “avenue de l’Île Tortue”, or even something less explicitly anti-colonial, since pretty much anything would be better than what it is now. With the first-person personal pronoun in English, though, what are we supposed to do? This is the place of “ai”.

Of course, there are other possibilities. Kuwasi Balagoon, for example, makes a conscious effort of not capitalizing his first-person personal pronoun in at least some of his writing. Ai think, though, that most people will read an uncapitalized letter-ai in a sentence like “Before becoming a clandestine revolutionary i was a tenant organizer…” as simply being a mistake. This is why ai like “ai”. When ai use “ai” as a pronoun, and especially when ai do so very consistently, it’s pretty obvious that ai have consciously and decidedly added a letter-ae [a, A] to the word, something which is more noticeable than the mere absence of capitalization in Balagoon’s writing.

There is, in fact, another benefit to using “ai” that has little to do with anything political. In text messages and emails and what-have-you, you sometimes CAPITALIZE a word in order put emphasis on it. This is because you often don’t have the option of italicizing words to place emphasis in these situations. Unfortunately, it is pretty much impossible to emphasize a single capitalized letter-ai in this way; you need to do other things, such as placing asterisks on either side of it. Example: “Well, what *I* think is that we should throw popcorn at them.”

With “ai”, though, it IS possible to place emphasis on the first-person personal pronoun with simply capital letters. Like: “He might have had tea with a bear, but AI once fucking wrestled a rainbow.”

Ai stopped using “ai” a few years ago because it was sometimes difficult to remember whether ai was emailing a person in a “professional capacity” or emailing a friend, and so ai would often get it mixed up. For obvious reasons, ai didn’t want to use “ai” with some stranger from whom ai was trying to get work, and as a result, this represented something of a problem. Ai also just stopped caring, and in fact, had already passed through my phase of writing out words like “persynal”, “womyn”, “wimmin”, and other things of the sort. But now, for this blog, ai am bringing it back – largely because ai still actually like it.

Ai am pretty certain that very few people, if any, will adopt the style of using “ai” as their own based on any of these reasons, but that would be okay by me. What ai have presented thus far are just the reasons that ai like using this style, and there should be space for me to use the style that ai like – even if it doesn’t fit others’ dictates of what constitutes proper English orthography – without having the content of what ai am saying be dismissed. Here, ai am asking that, even if you find this style immediately ugly, you don’t dismiss me based on that alone – and ai am also saying that the same good grace should be extended to those who pronounce words somewhat incorrectly, commit unknowing spelling errors, use certain terms in ways that are unfamiliar to us or simply different from the ways we use them, and whatever else that doesn’t actually make the words of such people any less comprehensible.

A great deal of this blog will make arguments that, indeed, people other than myself should do whatever ridiculous thing ai am arguing for. A great deal of this blog will deal with problems of language that, at least in my estimation, are important for all of us. But ai am also engaging in this project because ai want to do so, because ai like language, because ai like having fun with language. That includes writing things in the way ai want to write them, and not necessarily the way that it is most conducive to being understood – though ai think it shouldn’t be very hard to understand, from context, what “ai” means even if you don’t read this post. It’s not necessarily the approach ai’d take for a flyer to be handed out on the street, but it’s the approach ai’m going to take here.

Engaging Language /// FEU AU LEXIQUE DE L'ADVERSAIRE!

Wide-ranging efforts at categorization, concept and name rectification, and translation by a Montréal anarchist somewhere on the autistic spectrum

PROBLEMS WITH “SO-CALLED” AND «SOI-DISANT»

THE COLONIAL NAME OF MONTRÉAL IN ENGLISH: ACCENT OR NO?

TOWARDS A BETTER VOCABULARY OF QUEERNESS IN FRENCH

Final dictionary entries:

TRANSLATING THE NAME OF INDIVIDUALIDADES TENDIENDO A LO SALVAJE

THINGS THAT BOTHER ME ABOUT FRENCH, pt. 1: «AU-DESSUS» & «AU-DESSOUS»

TRANSLATING “SETTLER COLONIALISM” INTO FRENCH

Final dictionary entries:

A GENDER-NEUTRAL PRONOUN IN FRENCH?

BONJOUR/HI IS A STUPID SALUTATION

“AI” – AN ALTERNATIVE FIRST-PERSON PERSONAL PRONOUN IN ENGLISH