Pole Syrup, Straight from Bell Canada

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Dale Hutchins and I’m calling from Huntsville, Alabama.

Well, hello, Dale. Nice to talk to you. And you as well. I’m calling with a phrase that I found really fun and really funny. And I thought I would share it with you.

A little bit of background. I’m retired, but professionally, I was an egghead research chemist. And I worked for a big company that had research groups of other egghead chemists in several places, one in Minnesota, Alabama, where I am, one in Germany, and one in Belgium.

And so we’d get all the research people on the phone, on telephone conferences very often. So there’s people from all kinds of cultures and all kinds of languages. So you heard all kinds of accents on these.

One day on one of these, I was describing a product that I had made in my lab, and I described it as having the viscosity of pancake syrup. And a voice came on the telephone conference, what?

And I recognized it as the voice of one of the team members who was originally from Quebec City, but has moved to the Minnesota group. So he was French-Canadian, and he asked me what I had said several times. And I repeated it, you know, slower and louder every time.

And finally, he said, we call, and it was with a heavy French accent that I won’t try to duplicate. He said, we call that lamppost syrup. And, you know, when I obviously didn’t know what he was talking about, he explained that that syrup was was not like real maple syrup as they had in Quebec. And so it was so bad that it was like it was tapped from lampposts instead of trees.

So anyway, it was really fun. I expect it’s fairly regional, but I just wanted to share it with you.

Yeah, that’s wonderful, Dale. And I’m interested that he said lamppost and not like telephone pole or utility pole, sir. He said lamppost, huh?

No, he said lamppost syrup. How interesting. Because there is an expression that is used in Quebec, which means pole syrup, and it refers to like telephone poles or utility poles that are made of wood. And, you know, instead of tapping a maple tree, you tap one of these wooden utility poles to get this icky syrup. That’s just a pale imitation of the real thing.

Yes. Well, maybe he simplified it for us Americans. Maybe so. Maybe so. But that’s very picturesque and very disdainful, too, right? I mean, you know, that diluted corn syrup or that diluted maple syrup is nothing like the real thing.

Yep. Yep. Yeah, they actually have, just like they do with the different laws about champagne in France. And in Quebec, they have different laws about what qualifies as maple syrup. It’s like ensconced in law that has to meet these certain criteria because they don’t want any of this caro syrup nonsense.

I want to leave you, Dale, before we go with one other French term, which I really love that this reminds me of. When European French people talk about bad coffee, they will call it jus de chaussette, sock juice. Like it’s made from dirty socks.

Yes. That’s good. Well, thanks for your time. Our pleasure, Dale. It was real nice talking to you. Take care of yourself, all right? Thanks so much for calling, Dale.

Y’all as well. Bye-bye. All right. Bye. Take care.

How do they make fun of food out your way? We’d love to hear your idioms and slang. 877-929-9673.