by PATRICK LEJTENYI

If Molière ever had Internet access, there's a good chance he wouldn't be too thrilled about www.ciboire.com. With a simple click, the insult-generating Web site, created by Sylvain Lefebvre and Olivier Tremblay, spews out some of the most creative and bizarre curses ever to grace cyberspace. All in Québécois joual, meaning that non-francophones, and perhaps even some of the higher-brow ones, may need some kind of dictionary to translate them, should they so desire.

"Olivier and I started it because neither of us are really all that serious at work," says the 33-year-old Lefebvre, who works as a network manager in an unrelated day job. "We like goofing around."

The pair got the idea to create the site back in 2001, when they discovered L'Insultron, a European insult-generating site. "There were only 10 or 15 choices of insults, and none of them were that funny," he says. "There were things like, ‘espèce de lutins des bois,' things like that. So we started one but made it Québécois."

But bigger, with longer and much more vulgar curses. Ciboire.com's Insultatruc Virtuel has 13 windows, each with between 15 and 20 choice phrases, clauses and salutations. A click on the insult generating command banner at the top of the screen randomly samples the entries and produces a four-sentence, 70-odd word litany of abuse and contempt.

Many of the insults are sent in by the site's visitors. And while the entries range from fantastically bizarre to frat boy, with many butt sex and bodily fluid references thrown in, Lefebvre does draw a line. "I won't accept anything that has to do with pedophilia," says Lefebvre, the father of a seven-year-old daughter. "And they have to be funny. If someone sends in something like ‘sale nègre,' I won't accept it. If I laugh, I'll add it, but if it's just pipi caca, I won't."

Not surprisingly, Lefebvre swears a lot at home. "It was the way I was raised," he says. "I'll swear for almost anything. My daughter will scold me if I swear in front of her though, so she's keeping me in line. But I think the funniest thing I ever heard was her swear for the first time. She was four, and we were cleaning out cat litter and she said to me, ‘Ça pu en crisse ça, papa!'"

Lefebvre believes most of the contributors to the site are young, bored males. "They're usually either students or work in an office," he says. He updates the site in spurts, taking a few hours a night for a couple of weeks to go through the suggestions or work on the site's graphics. He is still finding interest in his hobby, he says.

"There are some suggestions that I would never have ever even thought about," he says. "Some of the entries are really surprising, and I'll say to myself, ‘That doesn't make any sense.'"