Nonono - see, there's "tabernacle", which is the recognized religious term, and then there's "tabarnak". There's "Hostie" (the host) and there's "esti". We essentially went around the rule stating we couldn't use religious words as swears by changing the pronunciation and spelling. That way, if you're back before the sixties and the ever-present deacon or priest gives you a look because you dared to speak of the Holy Host, you could shoot right back with "Hey, sorry Father, but I didn't say "Tabernacle". I said "Tabarnak".James Joseph Emerald said:
That's a tendency that's going on even today, but applied to more common English slurs. Most of us twenty-to-thirtysomethings won't shy away from saying "son of a *****" as-is, for instance, but a senior might say "sanababish!" - which is basically a corruption of the initial slur, created out of a lack of familiarity with English or just the plain old desire to get past a family member that's prone to act as a censor.
Of course, before the sixties freed us from the cultural control of the prelacy, these antebellum Men in Black used to pick up on our verbal creations. So sometimes, you'd have to further distort an already distorted slur. So from "Ciboire", we went to "Jériboire". From "Sacrament" (the Sacrament, plain and simple) we went to "Sacramouille".
These distortions went out of style almost as soon as the Quiet Revolution shook up Quebec and rid us of Church-appointed authority. With the clergy no longer feeding the erroneous perception that Francophone Canadians were basically born and bred to be the White niggers of North America, we didn't have to hide ourselves anymore. Further progress was made once we took a stand and managed to further seat our place in our own province - starting with Bill 101 making French the official language of the province.
From that point on, old creations dissipated and we started taking in slurs from our English-speaking neighbours in a more direct fashion. That period of repression left us with localized slurs for a certain type of exclusive English-speaking individual.
For most of everyone in the wide world of Shakespeare's tongue, "bloke" refers to an average Joe, a generic and generally masculine "somebody". For us, "bloke" was a corruption from English of the French word "bloc", meaning "block". To be perfectly honest, we used to have this charmingly hateful assumption by which most English speakers were considered blockheads - squares representing a rigid form of authority.
Again, poke around enough and you'll hear some old geezers using the word "bloke" to refer to persons from, say, the Westmount borough in Montreal. As before, this is also on the way out, seeing as Westmount isn't exclusively Anglophone anymore. It hasn't been for several decades.
So, yeah. Goes to show political events can colour everything, right down to a culture's swear words and derogatory terms.
