it comes in pints?

Montreal is, and is not, solidly French. It's this huge world city utterly different from the rest of the otherwise very provincial and introverted province, and someone once said that the first thing that would happen if Quebec ever does secede from Canada would be Montreal seceding from Quebec. This kind of PC bullshit strikes me as just as Canadian as it is French: despite that, I'm still a huge fan of Montreal (I spent six weeks there in the summer of 1999), and not nearly so much the rest of Quebec.

No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!

(Sorry, had to throw that in. Having a Python moment.)

Well, nobody AT ALL expects the Quebecois Inquisition! (And I mean, really - that just came right out of nowhere.)

As for the poor cop? It's funny (sad) that they question his motives given what he's said in the song. I mean, they never even question the mullahs and the radicals based on what they say. Only a multi-culti bureaucracy could care more about the lyrics and the motives of the cop, rather than the invaders.

An Indian born friend of my wife reckons British Indians are a bit backwards. They cling onto Indian customs which have been long left behind back in India.

I see in the Telegraph's report of this that the Quebec stop signs read "arrêt". In France, like most everywhere else in the world, they read "stop" and have done for years.

"They cling onto Indian customs which have been long left behind back in India."

That's how linguists trace the geographic origin of tongues. The place with the greatest linguistic diversity is the point of origin of the language. Emigrants are generally from a small set on the fringe of the population, and they preserve habits of language as their connection to their home. Americans use turns of phrase that the Brits left behind in the 18th century. That's also how they figured out that the Polynesians originated from tribes emigrating from the island of Taiwan (the aborigines that the Fujianese-origin Taiwanese call simply "the Barbarians").

'Gotten' is particularly harsh on the British ear. Shudder.

Hahaha, Mark. I can't remember what paper it was in, but I remember a few years ago reading an article by a British journalist who was practically ANGRY over the word "gotten" and the fact that it has slowly begun to slip into the British lexicon.

Mark, at least outside of Montreal, and ESPECIALLY in Quebec City itself, Quebec has practiclaly forever been "more French than the French." Until Troudeau, Quebec was largely very conservative as well, Catholic and Royalist (Bourbon royalist, not British royalist) by deliberate self-contrast to what they perceived as the godless liberal French Republic.

"Gotten" can only be preceded by "for" or followed by "Himmel" to not jar.

That figures Dave. A "pommie" is technically a more English than the English Australian - Prisoner Of Mother England - but that changed, obviously, and now it doesn't really make sense.

Why does American English bug Brits so much? People have gone rounds on the internet over the differences in spelling and word use. I don't think you'll find many Americans upset over the spelling of words like "favourite" and "centre" or the common usage in Britain of unshared vocabularies. I've noticed with the rise of the internet and the availability of foreign publications and blogs that certain Britspeak is slipping into American language - I find myself using words like "bloody" and "daft" where I never would have before and, with the exception of a few self-righteous shitheads, nobody in America really gets wound up about it.

I can't remember the exact wording but I think it was Mark Twain who once said "It's Britain's language but Americans have a majority share."

It doesn't bug me. "Gotten" just sounds strange that's all.

Whan that Aprill with his shoures sote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,
And bathed euery veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in euery holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe course yronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the niȝt with open ye—
So priketh hem Nature in hir corages—
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes;
And specially, from euery shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The holy blissful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke.

I reckon 1000 years ago we could have bantered with the Frisians about some of their amusing "get with the programme" quirks.