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Wasteful language police prodding has created a new stir among the victims. The culprits are still keen on going at the shops that spell café with more than one of and have the word pasta in their menu. You get targeted if there is something written that they can catch and they look ridiculous the world over except in their own haven. Who are these local language police zealots that park themselves in front of storefronts as they try to detect the slightest “infraction”? Whoever they are they make their parent country, where their own language originates a few centuries ago, cringe at the idiocy of the language controls over food names that are international.
Critics and observers in general are stupefied at the insistence for menu changes. Little do their care about how their polices paints a very poor picture of Quebec as a tolerant, cosmopolitan country. Parizeau diehards want the Parti Quebecois, behind these law applicants to go further and make their claim of separation. Parizeau failed in 1995 and he has not given up in encouraging that party to push its claim for a sovereign state into reality. The language “thing” is only an aspect of the matter.
So the language police are looking over menus that they “forgot” to hit decades ago or maybe they just wanted to intensify their brashness. Anglophones should do the same to make them just as uncomfortable about have only French menus in a dominant English country. Wouldn’t it be grand if mock English language police stage a similar event at a friendly French restaurant? After language might even have a field day at ridiculing how the French language has changed so much so that a Frenchman has difficulty doing business with a local Quebecois, at times, unless there is an intermediary.
If businesses did not close after Bill 101, more are closing because of Bill 14 and other laws that would want to restrict English at the cegep and make it impossible to learn English at grade 6. How does this separatist party want their kids to have an working knowledge of the world’s most popular language, which is not French, so that they will be self sufficient? They don’t. They would rather take some private English language lessons on their own, up to a certain level and then make some horrible gaffs when speaking, or wipe out access to the main language all together. All this complements the disaster occurring regarding ESL learning at the public school system where francophone students are discouraged to fill out their exercise books when there is homework to be done, or rather written work is definitely slighted and the student has little command of the language because one of the tools to express himself has been thwarted.
The word pasta is more than international it is part of recipes worldwide, And Cafés or “caffes” are also a dominant cultural fixtures wherever you go. New Canadian and immigrant establishments ought to band together to prevent further harassment from these narrow-minded controllers who are probably just after the money they can collect from fines.
