Here is just one example!
They wanted to come down hard on Buonanotte, the trendy Italian ristorante in Montreal frequented by the likes of Céline Dion and Leonardo DiCaprio. It features a menu that prominently advertises such classic dishes as pasta, pesce, antipasti, calamari, and insalata caprese, with explanations in French underneath. “My menu is fully French,” says owner Massimo Lecas. “It’s not even bilingual.” Even so, the prominent Italian offerings proved to be a little too piccante for the tongue troopers’ taste.
They were prepared to turn a blind eye to pizza, but not to polpette. They ordered the meatballs rebranded as boulettes de viande. And no more uncorking a bottiglia of wine, s’il vous plaît. It’s to be bouteille from now on. And pasta? That would be pâtes alimentaires.
All this cretineria, courtesy of the Office québécois de la langue française, the province’s language watchdog, makes the Parti Québécois government look like a bunch of peevish country hicks. And not for the first time. Remember Mendy Berson, the Jewish gravestone maker who got into trouble for having the Hebrew word for “monument” on his otherwise French/English sign? Or the campaign to stamp out the wall menus in Chinese restaurants because they were written in, well, Chinese?
This comes as the PQ tries to push its obnoxious Bill 14 into law. Among other things it forces businesses with more than 25 workers to operate in French, up from 50. It makes it harder for francophone kids to attend English colleges. And it makes it harder for towns whose anglo residents fall below 50 per cent to continue to offer services in both languages. All this seems excessive in an era when fewer than 10 per cent of Quebecers speak only English at home. The language of Molière has never been more secure.
Stung by Twitterverse mockery of their crackdown on Buonanotte, the tongue troopers have been forced to back off.. Officials now acknowledge a certain “excess of zeal” and say that maybe the restaurant ought to get an exemption for the “foreign specialities” it offers. After all, “judgment and moderation must guide us,” the government says. Yeah, whatever. Maybe the chef can rejig the menu to include some petto di corvo, a little helping of crow.
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