and fly in the Quebec language soup. The great sage Mordecai, Richler wrote, once answering a question from a friend of the law's Angela said, yes, 15,000 donuts. Had been held up at Montreal Airport because they weren't bilingual enough. While the still mist and always wonderful Mordecai would no-dote be edified to learn that years after his brilliant mockery of Quebec's tongue troopers, the silliness has not declined. In fact, it's evolved. From only-lingual donuts to parless pasta. This is real. Want to note, a long-established Italian restaurant has been cited for using Italian on its Italian menu, you know, a fence of exotic, really foreign, French dominating Italian words like pasta, spaghetti, bolognese, even Italian cooks are such patterns. Using the Italian word for bottle when listing Italian wine by the Italian bottle. Consider this. Is it possible for a human being equipped with an understanding arguably superior to that of an illiterate, untraveled term up to go into an Italian restaurant to order and enjoy Italian food and Italian wine served by Italian waiters and then complain officially that the word pasta is on the Italian menu. The restaurant was facing having to take these Italian marinated terms, pastas, spaghetti, off their provocative menu. There was a review of the point. The very fact that there is a statutory body paid by public money whose members are not rolling around the floor throwing up from unstoppable after at the very idea of even reviewing whether pasta is proper is in itself a milestone in the lunacy of linguistic purechnism. Well, today after much deliberation and more mockery, pasta on Italian menus is no longer under threat in Montreal. How strange it is. French, much like English, has a whole troll net full of Latin terms, words entirely based under early Roman Italian sources. French should only be half the language it is without early Italian Latin. It's not the best argument for Quebec sophistication. It's quite noticeable skills in the arts of good living that some of its more zealous citizens are making them look provincial to the rest of the world. Richler would have seen this as another illustration of the bottomless folly of trying to police people in how they like to live, eat, sleep, and talk of bullying for the higher cause. Tomorrow, an idiom, it's all very hard to swallow. That Italian restaurant was under legal scrutiny for having pasta on its menu. And that there are any people in the sophisticated province who, even in the delirium of political correctness, believe this should be the case. Next week, by the way, I plan to ask the question Chinese wonton soup, appetizer or linguistic time bomb, tune in. For the National, I'm Rex Murphy.