German and French

The other day while covering in at the toolcrib I was a little bored so I looked around and found a little work-related book to read through. It was the constitution for our International union that is centered in Washington, D.C. It spells out who can be in the union and what a hall needs to do to stay in the union. An interesting little book really. I managed to stay awake just long enough to read through the first two pages at which point my mind was going numb and I worried about slipping into a delirium! The first page of said constitution had some information which, frankly, surprised me! In article 1 subsection 3 it says that you cannot have membership in the union if you are a communist, a fascist or a nazi. No mention of the KKK of course but still. I may be a little niaive but wasn't one of the original knocks against unions that they were a move towards communism? Our country has Socialist parties such as the NDP and isn't socialism a slightly more democratic version of communism? I will have to look into this more as I am no political thinker and may have misunderstood the roots of these things but that one I did find slightly odd. Another slightly odd thing about subsection 3 was the bit about nazis. It's odd because our current employers built the gas chambers for goodness sakes! I am in no way accusing Thyssen Krupp of being nazi in any way but that is a significantly 'Nazi influenced' past! Of well, that stuff all happened close to 80 years ago and I guess qualifies as being what was rather than what is. I was thinking about all this while working away with three of my French Canadian buddies. One thing that I have really come to understand since working here is that not all French Canadians are alike. The ones I worked with yesterday for instance are from New Brunswick. Their French is from their Acadian ancestry and you can not assume that they like Quebecers much. Some do but lots don't. Then there are the French folks from places like Northern Ontario and apart from the language they have not a lot in common with the other two groups. Yet another French group are the Metis people of mixed French and Native ancestry. In a lot of their cases the 'mixing' took place a few generations ago and yet to this day many are still fluent in the French language. My pal Spuds McIron falls into this category. She rarely let's people know about her fluency though as she enjoys listening to what the other French guys are saying when they still think she can't understand what she is saying. Language and language acquisition has so much to do with idioms that it makes me wonder. Idioms are those things we say that don't actually translate officially. It's like when you say you are going to 'pinch a loaf' rather than saying you are going to evacuate your bowels (have a shit for the rest of us). These expressions have their roots and derive their meaning from a common cultural experience. That experience may. OT be shared across fairly isolated cultural groups like the Metis or the Acadians or the Francaphones from northern Ontario. So it made me wonder just how much these guys really understand of each other when they get flying along in their own language. The good news is that you can almost always tell someone who is a French speaker from their unique names. Lots of Jean-Guys or Pierre's or Elises. Not always though. Yesterday I was working with two very French guys. Their names are John Smith and Bruce McLaughlin. And of course Spuds McIron is actually Brittany. So in the magical world of construction nothing is as it appears and anything goes! And that's all fine with me. :)