In this Huffington Post Québec article, a man talks about how he had to take care of his little sister when growing up because of the negligence of his parents. In his words, he used to feed her (lui faire à manger), check her homework (checker ses devoirs)… «je faisais la job d’un parent».
We’ve seen before how la job can be used informally to talk about employment, in the sense of un emploi. But la job can also be used in a broader non-employment sense, like here, when the man said he used to do la job d’un parent, the job of a parent.
You’ll also hear the verb checker fairly frequently in spoken language, like here in checker ses devoirs, to check her homework.
But getting back to job, what’s the difference between la job and le job, and are both used in Québec?
European usage knows only le job.
Québécois usage is a little more complex:
In conversations, you’ll hear job used spontaneously in the feminine. In writing, you’ll come across both. When the writer wants to remain faithful to normal, spoken language, the feminine form will be used; this might include, for example, Facebook posts and tweets. Otherwise, the masculine form might be preferred (it’s not a rule!), such as in advertising or the media. That said, it isn’t impossible to come across the feminine form in advertising or the media (see image below, from #714).
No matter what, though, job is always an informal usage, whether it’s masculine or feminine.
By the way, you can’t just change la job to le job to “convert” it to French (from France) usage. For example, the Québécois expression ça va faire la job means that’ll do the job, that’ll do the trick. You can’t just change this to ça va faire le job and expect that to be the European usage. That’s because this is a Québécois-specific expression using only the feminine form. (A possible equivalent not using la job is ça fera l’affaire.)
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