Posted on 06/09/2013 5:23:55 AM PDT by Kaslin
I received still more emails from French and Canadian readers on preserving culture. Since it's a slow news day, let's take a look at them.
Olivier writes "Wouldn't a true conservative pay at least some respect to local cultural norms instead of trying to impose some economic diktat from on down?"
Talk about getting things ass backwards. It is the social police attempting to impose cultural and economic diktats to preserve the local bookstore and the local farm to the point of absolute absurdity.
Email From Canada
Reader Mike from Canada writes ...
Hi Mish,
I totally agree with the ridiculousness of bureaucrats and their attempts "to preserve" culture. The very meaning of the verb "to preserve" implies that the object being preserved is dead. One preserves fruits after they are picked, and bodies after they are dead. One cannot preserve a living thing.
A culture must continually adapt and grow to keep living, not be preserved.
I live in the province of Quebec, and unfortunately I can provide numerous examples on the government's inane attempts to preserve local French culture. Recently, the Quebec Language police made headlines when they tried to outlaw the use of the word "pasta" in Italian restaurants because it is not a French word. After the international hilarity that ensued and embarrassed them, the nannycrats backed down.
A great example of tax dollars being wasted.
Thanks for your posts,
Mike B
Montreal
Quebec's language watchdog is backtracking after demanding a chic Montreal Italian restaurant change its menu because Italian words such as "pasta" were too predominant.Collision Course
Massimo Lecas, owner of Buonanotte said he was contacted by the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) on Valentine's Day.
He said he was told the menu contains too much Italian.
He said he was also instructed to translate the Italian words for meatball and calamari into French, even though the descriptions for each of those menu items are already in French.
Earlier in the day, Martin Bergeron, a spokesman for the OQLF, said the language watchdog is not splitting hairs.
While he said he cannot discuss the specifics of the case, Bergeron said the law is clear.
"Other languages can be on the menu," he said. "The thing is they must not be predominant over French."
Battle over fish and chips
Brit & Chips, a fish and chip restaurant in the Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood, also received a letter asking it to comply with the language police's guidelines.
The OQLF demanded that the owner, Toby Lyle, add the word "restaurant" predominantly above the eatery's name.
Lyle said he takes issue with the OQLF's order to translate the restaurant's main dish to "poisson frit et frites."
He said removing "fish and chips" from the window will push customers away.
None of this was an issue until the 1960s. Businesses got smart...figured out how to attract customers, and didn’t care if they broke French culture rules or not.
And if you are working as a French culture cop....it’s a lousy choice and you’d be better off washing cars....if you ask me.
You walk into any Lowe’s & the English/Espanol signs are everywhere because that’s the result of a business decision made by management.
Visited Ottawa last year. Everything is English/Francaise even though you’re in Ontario, not Quebec. I brought back a bottle of `Lemon Juice/Jus de Limon’.
But the bilingualism in Canada is federal law, & not at all voluntary. Very different country/pais.
Pasta, too Italian of a word?
And here I thought that ‘pasta’ was an English word.
Oh, wait, it IS an English word. English is smart enough to steal, with regularity, words from other languages and make them its own. That’s why English is a rich, vibrant language. And the opposite approach that some French speakers take is the reason that French may become a static, and hence dying, language.
Perhaps they should build another Maginot line!
If the French were so interested in preserving their unique French culture, then they would expel all Muslims from France (and from Quebec).
The French should just go ahead and surrender to someone.
Und ob mein Herz im Tode bricht
Wirst du doch drum ein Welscher nicht
Pasta actually comes from the Latin word Pasta
Excellent observation!!
Hahahaha! Looking at the title of this thread, I thought I was looking at one of Homer_J_Simpson's wonderful threads!
This kind of strikes a nerve in the US as well. Probably the best current example is Wal-Mart. There are both pluses and minuses of a Wal-Mart moving into a small town.
It does provide cheaper products because of scale. It also provides a lot of minimum wage jobs. However, what is lost in the process are dozens of small businesses, with locally produced products, local “color” and “mood”. If you get Wal-Mart, your town has to hustle, because you are part of the Wal-Mart system, the consumer part.
And Wal-Mart does not adapt to local communities at all, being so top-down oriented that even store temperatures are controlled by the national headquarters.
Even when Wal-Mart leaves an area, usually because of efforts to unionize its employees, towns don’t recover what they were. Local businesses are permanently replaced by national chains, and if they pack up and leave, nobody replaces them.
In all fairness, national chains are attracted like moths to flame when they find a town with local color, because they want to glom on to that color, in a microcosm of what Wal-Mart does.
Instead of being a unique place, the town is left a generic husk, like thousands of other such towns.
As a final note, the courts absolutely reject efforts by towns to block out national chain franchises. This is because the national chains will spend a fortune to penetrate those markets.
The growing influence of Muslims in France is more of a threat to French culture than “fish and chips”, “hamburgers”, and “pasta”. The language police need to ban Arabic words from France, not just words from English, German, and Italian. They can start by painting over Arabic signage in areas where that language predominates.
This time, let Germany KEEP France!
This time, Germany DOES NOT WANT France.
France’s Immigrant Problem - and Ours(2006)
http://www.claremont.org/writings/crb/spring2006/hanson.html
“57% of Mexicans in [a] Zogby poll believed that they should have the right to cross the border freely and without U.S. permission.”
“In a recent Pew poll, 40% of all Mexicans expressed a desire to immigrate to the U.S.”
that’s too large a number for our spineless politicians to ingnore when it comes time to shell out the free cheeze for votes.
It’s an odd culture. They fight with their feet and f**k with their faces.
Pasta actually comes from the Latin word Pasta
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Yes, it came to Italian from its “parent” language Latin. But it came to English from the Italian immigrants, and their Italian language, who introduced us to their pasta (the food, not the word).
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