Pulling a sickie in Quebec and France

I was reminded of the delightful colloquial French for “se déclarer malade, souvent pour échapper à une corvée” by its use in Libération. Cécilia Sarkozy, clearly a loose cannon (that may look like a deliberate and even sexist pun on “loose” in English and on “canon” in French, but any secondary meanings are unintentional, honest), was unavailable for a hamburger lunch with George Bush but recovered swiftly in order to go shopping. Libé, 14th August: “en se faisant porter pâle chez les Bush, la première dame s’écarte encore du protocole et intrigue.”

“Se faire porter pâle” = to chuck a sickie (if you’re Australian), and “to pull/take a sickie” if British. According to Jonathon Green’s Cassell Dictionary of Slang it’s of Australian origin and dates back to the 1950s, whereas Partridge agrees about the Australian origin but goes as far back as 1930.

The standard English “to call in sick” (= se faire porter malade/se déclarer malade/téléphoner pour prévenir/dire qu’on est malade) has led to the creation of the Québecois “caller malade”, as in the recently-heard “ma collègue avait callé malade” from a Francophone Canadian.

“Un canon”, by the way, is at the same time a sexist and admiring term for “une belle femme, aux formes épanouies” (Larousse Dictionnaire de l’argot), in case you were wondering about my earlier apology for the unintentional pun. “A babe” or “a stunner” would therefore be an appropriate tabloid-speak translation.
 

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Gaullist vocabulary

To my shame, only this week did I learn that de Gaulle was the first to use “l’Hexagone” for “La France”, in 1934 in Vers l’armée de métier. It has become such a cliché of political vocabulary that the hoary old gag about “les quatre coins de l’Hexagone” is even in the pages of the Grand Robert, tagged as “plais”. What’s interesting now is the journalistic use of the adjective “hexagonal” for “français” or “de la France”; I saw Diam’s French tour this year described in Le Monde as “sa tournée hexagonale”.
 

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