U and moi

If you look at the tags in the right hand column of this column (down, no down more, past the picture of my book now available for pre-order, keep going, past my Twitter feed, down — man, I have too many widgets!), you’ll notice that I tag most of my pieces both “humor” and “humour.” This is because, as many of you like to remind me, I’m Canadian. And if you weren’t pointing that out, I probably would be; Canadians like to remind themselves and everyone else that they’re Canadian because, as a people, we are attention-starved and terribly needy.

I also live in Quebec, a province that is 90 percent French. You want to talk about attention-starved and needy!

Quebec anglos (as we English like to call ourselves) struggle to keep their language and culture alive, especially under the current government, which is determined to ratchet up the rhetoric and oppression linguistic-wise. It gets ugly sometimes, and the issues sometimes divides neighbours.

See what I did there? I spelled it “neighbours” with a U. It makes me feel a little bit French…

Really, this all makes some kind of sense. You can find out how in my latest over at Life in Quebec. S’il vous plait!