In Québec, you’ll find slush all year round… not because winter never ends, but because you can drink it in the summer as a treat.
In the winter, la sloche (or la slush) is snow on the ground that becomes watery and dirty as large numbers of pedestrians or cars pass over it.
Corner of rue Sainte-Catherine and rue Guy in Montréal, December 2013
In the summer, you can drink la sloche (or la slush) in the form of a colourful, icy drink that you slurp up through a straw.
Window of a dépanneur at the Palais des congrès de Montréal, July 2015
For the sake of interest, and as you might have imagined, the OQLF recommends different words for these two concepts because sloche comes from English. For winter slush, one of the recommended words is la gadoue. For summer slush, one of the recommended words is la barbotine. This doesn’t stop people from using sloche colloquially in both cases, of course.
One of the reasons they give for not recommending sloche is that it doesn’t fill any gaps in the French language because words like gadoue and barbotine exist. This argument doesn’t hold up; we can also say that gadoue and barbotine don’t fill any gaps because the word sloche exists. Shall we stop saying content because heureux exists? It’s unclear to me why they need to hide the real motive and which everybody already knows anyway — they don’t recommend sloche because it comes from English.
