Revving the Search Engine

Looking through my blog stats recently I saw that a search engine term that led people to this blog was ‘poutine prostitute’. Interesting combination. My first thoughts were something about gravy and second degree burns, then french fry pimp, and then finally, what on my site could possibly be linked to this search term? It took me a bit to remember but here’s the answer.

G. from Geoffrey’s Periodic Inanities made this comment a while back:

When I was younger and in Quebec I mispronounced “poutine” as “poutan.” Nothing gets a cafeteria worker’s attention faster than ordering a prostitute.

I was curious to see what else I could find about poutine prostitutes so I did a little googling and found this article:

Now we come to the reason that French is known as the language of diplomacy. In France’s official documents, as well as uniformly in the French press, Vladimir Putin’s last name is spelled Poutine. As a natural result, it is pronounced poo-TEEN, rhyming with our ”routine.” The French undoubtedly know that is not the way he or his compatriots, or even President Bush looking into his soul, pronounce Putin’s name. (To head off a torrent of e-mail from Quebec, let me acknowledge that poutine is also French-Canadian comfort food: fried potatoes suffused in cheese and dollops of salty gravy.)

Why the error in transliteration? Official French sources tell me that because the sound that we write as in has no place in French pronunciation, an e has been added to make the sound more amenable to the French tongue, and that’s all there is to it. They note — somewhat stiffly, anticipating the direction of my inquiry — that they have added a vowel to other names for this purpose. But other, more conspiratorial linguists suggest that the spelling of Putin in English would be pronounced as putain in French — that is, sounding close to pew-TANH.

Putain, in French, means ”prostitute; whore,” or in current correctese, ‘’sexual-services provider.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it is the probable source, slightly corrupted, of the U.S. slang term poontang, a derogation of women as a means of sexual gratification. Hence, the rejection of the English spelling of Putin and the switch to Poutine, pronounced poo-TEEN. Small wonder that French arbiters of usage and pronunciation — perhaps out of commendable delicacy, in the interest of the avoidance of offense and the leers of pundits — have embraced phony phonetics, unanimously choosing to mispronounce the name of the president of Russia.