#fun fact this post clocks in at 868 words

[gayarograce]

Just went down an information rabbit hole which, while resulting in basically a net zero information gain, I still found quite interesting. There are some clicky links throughout this post so you can see all the web pages I talk about here.

Our story begins with the Quebecois swear tabarnak.

I was doing a quick bit of research, simply because Quebecois swearing is a Trip™️, when I stumbled across the word's Wiktionary entry. And in it, I spot this line:

Now, as someone who has been learning Spanish for a hot minute now and likes to pick up odd words whenever I see them, this piqued my interest. Naturally, I go to look up some more information on the word tabarnaco.

I don't find much. Naturally, when looking into the meanings of Spanish words, my first idea was to search in the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE, from Real Academia Española). The RAE does not contain any entries for the word tabarnaco. I do find an entry on Urban Dictionary, but I don't really hold it as a super reputable source, I don't think? And that's it.

Before I continue recounting my trip further down the rabbit hole, let me take a moment to explain a bit about the relevant linguistics at play here.

A lot of swears in Quebecois French come from French words pertaining to Christianity in one way or another for reasons I didn't pursue in this quest for knowledge. (I was after something else, as you could see.) The Quebecois swear tabarnak is a respelling of the French tabernacle, which translates into English as tabernacle and into Spanish as tabernáculo.

Back to the story. Like anyone else might do when potential online sources for something have dried up, I turned to Reddit. I made a post asking if the word tabarnaco is used in Mexico to refer to the Quebecois. Unfortunately, the post and all responses are in Spanish. If you can't read Spanish, an online translator will probably do the job just fine. I haven't tested it. Anyway, while I didn't get a ton of responses, the ones I did get converge pretty soundly onto one answer: no.

Now the question in my mind was "What gives?" Sure, Wikipedia and its sister sites are wrong sometimes, that's just a given, but why was it wrong in this case? This seems like a pretty silly thing to mess up. Was it a simple mistake? Was it vandalism, for some reason?

First things first: who added the line I screenshotted above? A quick dig back through the page's edit history reveals that it was added by the Wiktionary user Urhixidur. A look at their page shows that their native language is French, the have a professional understanding of English, and they have next to no understanding of Spanish. This is a bit of a red flag, but whatever, I guess.

Another thing: you can't tell from the screenshot because I highlighted the relevant line, but the link for tabarnacos is red, indicating that there is no English Wiktionary link for the word. This page also does not exist in Spanish Wiktionary. However, it does exist in French Wiktionary. By going to the French Wiktionary page for the singular form, tabarnaco, you can see an example usage.

Finally, I might have started to get somewhere.

The given example is the title of a collection of poems by Paul-Marie Lapointe, titled Le sacre : Libro libre para Tabarnacos libres, published in 1998. This is stranger than it might appear at first glance. Paul-Marie Lapointe was born in and died in Quebec. The title is partially in French and partially in Spanish. While I do not have easy access to a copy of these poems, they are, to the best of my knowledge, entirely in French. I was able to track down the names of the poems, of which there are ten, and, in order, the first letter of each of their titles spells out T-A-B-A-R-N-A-C-O-S.

And this, dear reader, is where I have decided this story ends, at least from my perspective. I have given up on trying to locate further any sort of origin for this maybe-word-maybe-not-word. Maybe Lapointe, from the great Mexican state of Quebec, was the first. Maybe it was used earlier than him. I don't know, and I've run out of both the energy and the means to keep looking.

This has been what has been consuming a lot of my time last night and all throughout today. I decided to write this out to try and finally put it to rest in my mind. This was an interesting journey, trying to find more information on this word, which probably does not actually exist in any major way in Mexican varieties of Spanish. I don't know if anyone has read this far, honestly. I don't normally write posts this long. If you have actually read this far, then, uh, thank you, I guess. You really didn't have to, lol. Maybe you found it interesting. I certainly did. If you didn't then, ostie de crisse de tabarnak, why did you read this far?

OK, that's it. That's the end. I'm done now.