italian

Friday, February 22, 2013

Friday, February 22, 2013By Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday, February 22, 2013

For Quebec’s language police, even “pasta” is a problem

Mamma mia! The mangacakes in Quebec have got their voyageur sashes all in a knot over a little Italian on the dinner menu. After targeting the language of Shakespeare, the province’s language police –aka “tongue troopers”— decided to set their sights on Dante, of all people.

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? (Source: Toronto Star)

Tuesday November 8, 2011

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday November 8, 2011

Berlusconi’s future bleak as crucial vote looms

The future of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi looked increasingly bleak after his main political ally, the Northern League, asked him to step down just ahead of a crucial vote that could bring down the government and inject yet more uncertainty into the massive Italian debt market.

“We have asked the prime minister to step aside,” Umberto Bossi, leader of the Northern League party, told reporters Tuesday.

The withdrawal of the Northern League’s support makes it unlikely that Mr. Berlusconi will muster enough support to survive a routine vote on last year’s budget accounts Tuesday afternoon in Rome. If he does lose the vote in the Chamber of Deputies, he will almost certainly face a confidence vote, though not necessarily immediately.

The Northern League has not always been a dependable ally. The party brought down Mr. Berlusconi’s first government, in 1994.

Mr. Berlusconi has won more than 50 confidence votes since 2008, when he was elected for a third time since the 1990s. A series of defections, however, are tilting the odds against him. In recent days, three party members joined the opposition and six others called for him to quit. Mr. Berlusconi needs 316 votes in the 630-seat chamber to claim victory.

The market didn’t react strongly to the Northern League defection and the strong chance that Mr. Berlusconi would go down in flames Wednesday. Yields on Italian bonds initially rose, setting a new record, then slipped slightly to about 6.62 per cent in the early afternoon, Rome time. That’s still firmly in crisis territory. (Source: Globe & Mail)