Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! [antikvár]

OneNineteen ninety. On a perfect summer day in Montreal, local raspberries in season, two tickets to that night's ball game riding in my breast pocket, I went to meet some friends at a downtown bar I favored at the time: Woody's Pub, on Bishop Street. As I arrived, a solemn middle-aged man was taking photographs of the blackboard mounted on the outside steps. He was intent on a notice scrawled in chalk on the board:today's special Ploughman's LunchThe notice happened to be a blatant violation of Quebec's Bill 178, which prohibits exterior signs in any language but French, and the photographer was one of a number of self-appointed vigilantes who, on lazy summer days off from work, do not head for the countryside to cool off in the woods or to fish; instead, they dutifully search the downtown streets for English-language or bilingual commercial signs that are an affront to Montreal's visage linguistiquehiya! vermont baseball fans welcome here, say, or happy hour 5 to 7. They photograph the evidence and then lodge an official complaint with the Commission de protection de la langue française. Woody was lucky. A chalkboard sign can be erased. However, had he chosen to promote his lunches with an outside neon sign in English only, or even a bilingual one, that would have been something else again. A first offense would get him off with no worse than a warning from one of the commission's inspectors. All the same, a dossier would be opened on him. There would be another visit to his bar and, if he persisted in his obloquy, a letter from a bailiff with a thirty-day warning, and then a period of grace of up to nine months before he might be scheduled