L'Arbitre est un Robber!

"What kind of French shall we speak in 25 years?" asked Ottawa's Le Droit last week. "Will the laborer's jargon, which we know is composed of French and English badly pronounced, be purified . . ? Will the language of commerce, renouncing its innumerable borrowings from English, be a truly French language?"

Many French Canadians were asking that sort of question. In the cities, Quebeckers have always been proud of the purity of their tongue; they bristle when English-speaking visitors call it a patois. Once.it seemed that improved communications (newspapers, the radio and movies) would flatten out regional differences brought by the settlers from Normandy and Brittany, Aunis and He de France. Instead, better communications sped corruption of the language, mainly by "barbarous" Anglicisms.

In a recent Quebec court case, Judge Oscar Boulanger spoke his outrage at French-speaking witnesses who used English words for the parts of a car. Example: "le steering knuckle-arm" for la tige du joint de direction. Along Quebec roads, French-speaking motorists ask for "gas" instead of essence.

For a quarter of a century, the Societe du bon parler franc.ais has been battling the encroachment of English. Each year it bombards French Canadians with 100,000 blotters, bearing exhortations to keep their speech pure. Students among the 27,000 members pay a one-cent fine to fellow members who catch them in solecisms.

This week, for the 959th time, Society President Jules Masse took to the air over CKAC (Montreal). As always, he opened with Expressions a corriger cette semaine. His prime examples: "Hip! Hip! Hurray!" should give way to "Hourra! Bravo!" and in the counting house Frenchmen should speak of un verificateur de limes, not un auditeur de limes.

The purists were fighting uphill. Most of Quebec's women say "lipstick" for rouge a levres, and "Cutex" (a trade name) for any nail polish--vernis a angles. In the sports arena, their menfolk scream: L'arbitre est un robber! A prizefight announcer cries: Le champion a knockoute son adversaire. And French Canadians of both sexes grin as they say II faut se watcher and C,a, c'est le fun.

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