Every year, all the employees at Automattic get together for the Grand Meetup, a week long meetup filled with projects and fun activities. Since almost everyone works from home (we don’t share an office together), this is the only opportunity that we get to see each other all at the same time. One part of the Grand Meetup that I found to be a lot of fun, and which gave everyone an opportunity to learn a bit about each other (since at least a third of the company wasn’t part of the company yet at last year’s Grand Meetup!) was that everyone, and I mean everyone (including Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress, and Toni Schneider, the CEO) has to give a 4 minute flash talk, on anything they want. This year’s talks were a heck of a lot of fun, but there were over 200 of them! Every morning and every evening, a bunch of Automatticians would give their talks in front of everyone else. Some people were really nervous; others, less so, but everyone did a fantastic job. The topics covered anything under the sun: from Topographic Maps, to reading a story someone had written, to someone giving their home-made sriracha sauce recipe. I decided that I wanted to share a little bit about Québec’s culture, so I talked about how we swear in Québec. (warning: obviously, the language is NSFW)

And here are my slides, so folks can see the ones I had to skip over:

Now, I can’t claim credit for the originality of the content; I got most of it from the following Wikipedia pages:

• Quebec French Profanity
• Sacre québécois

This video was particularly inspiring for my talk:

And this is pretty funny too:

And, if you want to hear some more Québecois joual, have a look at this TV show from a few years back, Les Bougons: