UPDATED/Jahasra

Now updated with the screen shot which I forgot to upload earlier.

Former prime minister and current Labour MEP Alfred Sant discusses the profound political issues of pork and chicken in The Malta Independent.

He has sold the myth successfully that he is highly literate, but his writing is appalling and his English is clunky and ‘foreign’.

There are two massive Maltese-isms in the lead-in shown here alone: “if I am understanding” (typically Maltese) rather than the correct present tense of “If I understand”; and then that horrid, utterly detestable ‘LOCAL production’ when what he means is ‘DOMESTIC production’.

I wish the government would legislate to make the use of LOCAL for DOMESTIC, NATIONAL, or MALTESE a crime punishable by a maximum term of three years in prison.

‘Local’ is not just a linguistic heresy. It also denotes a frame of mind. ‘Local’ is what English settlers used and still use to differentiate themselves from the natives: the locals, with their local food and their local mores and their local ways and means.

And what did we do? We happily picked it up and ran with it, and began calling ourselves and our food and our habits ‘local’.

Unbelievable, and so very irritating.

‘Local’ is the grocer’s shop up the road by the chapel. ‘Local chicken production’ is Pacikk’s chicken farm across the way. ‘Local wine’ is that made at the Meridiana Estate, which is close to where I live. It is local wine to me and everyone else who lives within a short radius of the estate, but to everybody else it is MALTESE wine.

I think I should start a separate side-blog about these linguistic issues which drive me nuts and which have reduced the English spoken and written in Malta into a separate and often unintelligible dialect.