The New Democrats - en français!

I know I'm guilty of 'thinking in English' here. I don't claim to be doing anything else. I'm hardly an expert.

But I really don't get 'Nouveau Parti démocratique'. I mean I don't quite understand how the name 'New Democratic Party' translates into French.

I half get it. I remember enough of my high school French to recall that some adjectives come before nouns, like 'nouveau', and some come after, like 'démocratique'. You could say 'C'est un nouveau parti', or 'C'est un parti démocratique'. Fine.

But that seems to imply that the Nouveau Parti démocratique is a party with is both nouveau and démocratique. Like Barack Obama's party is the original one, and this is the 'new one'. 'Democratic Party, Part II'.

Personally, though, I've always understood the party name not to mean 'Democrats: The Next Generation' so much as 'the Party of New Democrats', the party of people who believe in a kind of 'new democracy. After all, supporters call themselves 'New Democrats', with no sense that the 'new' there describes them as individuals or points out some kind of novelty within the party.

That being the case then, it feels to me - it's always felt to me - as if the party's French name ought to be the 'Parti nouveau démocratique'. Or perhaps the 'Parti nouveau-démocratique' (with that sexy hyphen). But why isn't it?

Qui est-ce? C'est Colette.

In a fit of nostalgia I decided to Google the following:

Qui est-ce? C'est Colette.
Bonjour, Colette. Ça va?

Qui est-ce? C'est Colette.
Bonjour, Colette. Ça va?

Non, ça va mal.
Et toi? Comme ci comme ça.

Non, ça va mal.
Et toi? Comme ci comme ça.

I suppose people of a certain age who went to school in Ontario might remember this - it was a song, and one that was well-loved by both me and pretty much everyone else in my French class circa... er, grade 5 perhaps. But maybe not - Google returned zero results. That's the first time I've gotten zero results from Google in a long time now. It's strange to find a hole in the internet's knowledge, no matter how obscure. It's taken us barely any time at all to fill the internet with everything-we-know-about-everything. By now we're just applying the plaster over those tiny little holes. Soon enough you'll be able to get that song (and there was one about 'les animaux' that was pretty rockin') on iTunes, but until then, it remains a tiny scrap of memory available only in the human mind.

You can find reference to Zip, Zap, Zop and Zoup - scant reference on a blog or two - but precious little considering how many people learned French thanks to them. And not a single illustration, either - so in order to illustrate this blog entry I've had to go to the relatively way-more-popular Ananas from Téléfrançais.