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.
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
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.
This time, let Germany KEEP France!
It’s an odd culture. They fight with their feet and f**k with their faces.