A short Facebook update by Rabii Rammal reminds us of both Québécois vocabulary and good manners on this brutal winter day:
Ce soir après la job, stationne pas ton char dans la place que ton voisin a déneigée. C’est pas très gentil.
This evening after work, don’t park your car in the spot that your neighbour had to shovel. That’s not very nice.
la job
job, work
[ne] stationne pas
don’t park
ton char
your car
la place
place, spot
déneiger
to clear away the snow
When a snowplough comes along, it dumps mounds of snow around cars parked in the street, blocking them in. Owners then have the pleasure of having to dig their car out with a shovel. These are the parking spots that Rabii asks neighbours not to steal after work (wouldn’t it be nice).
Thanks to Felix’s excellent explanations from previous posts, I was actually able to read Rabii’s comment and understand it all. Your blog is having a good effect on my French comprehension Felix!
Very glad to hear it, keep going!
Wow. I actually understood that! Thanks! (You have probably covered this, but “char” is preferred ahead of “voiture” in Quebec?
There are a few different words for car: char, auto, voiture. Of the three, char is the most informal (ok for colloquial language), voiture is on the other end, and auto is somewhere in the middle. All three words are used; it’s the language level that determines which is most likely to be used. We can’t say that char is always preferred ahead of voiture because there are times when that wouldn’t be true (e.g., in a news report, you’d hear voiture or véhicule, not char). As a guideline, the more informal the language, the more likely you are to hear char. In Rabii’s quote, we’ve also got la job, which is informal (un char and la job are on the same level of informality).
Merci bien. Je comprends!