"Spuzzum" by Laforet & York: An excerpt

[Mike Cleven]

janilta wrote:
>
> David, Mike,
>
> Just a few thoughts about the French expressions in your msg.
> For 'holaporte', I can only figure a situation when someone leaves a
> place without shutting the door and the remaining party would yell 'ho !
> la porte !' (the door, darn !) or something. 'a la porte' can bear the
> idea of 'get out !' and thus 'be fired'. Cannot figure something else.
> Both 'au la bord' and 'au d'abord' don't exist. I can just think of
> '(tous) a bord !' matching the English '(all) aboard !'. 'You first'
> would be 'toi/vous d'abord'.

Maybe "on d'abord"?  The phrasing sounds _really_ familiar to me - I
worked on construction crews back in the '80s that were run in
Saguenard; maybe this is another franco-Canuckism; something peculiar to
regional French.  I'll suss my friends out if I get a chance; I should
be in that town later next week (Whistler, the ski resort).

> 'Pail' in French is 'le seau'. Maybe it is here a mistake for 'le pot'
> ie pot, jar, jug (the sounds are close to 'lapot'... if we just consider
> the mute 't' and the le/la confusion not impossible).

"Lapote" is usually door in the Jargon - from la porte, of course.
There's a couple of other instances where a French borrowing has been
simplified/altered by substitution a French word-form with an English
one; the example that comes to mine is "laboat", which may not be in
Columbia-Puget Jargon but is found in Interior BC, and also as a
loan-word in other English languages.  "La pot" should be the source
here - except for the long 'o' sound; although that'd be easy enough to
mutate.  The le/la confusion is kinda taken for granted in the
Jargon....

> 'Washem' is a common expression in many pidgins to mean 'to wash'.

The usual Jargon expression is "wash" or "mamook/munk wash".......

Then there's that pashem=>washem thing; any of the professional
linguists in the group wanna comment on a consonant shift or confusion
between p and w .....