{"id":7943,"date":"2018-07-27T14:36:46","date_gmt":"2018-07-27T12:36:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=7943"},"modified":"2018-07-27T14:36:46","modified_gmt":"2018-07-27T12:36:46","slug":"italian-but-not-as-we-know-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/7943\/","title":{"rendered":"Italian, but not as we know it"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the comments<\/a> at Tim Worstall’s:<\/p>\n

I think I\u2019ve said this here before, my late missus (pbuh), although Austrian was born in Italy and used to say to me:<\/p>\n

\u201cYou lot might well poke fun at Mussolini for making the trains run on time, but he did one important thing. He made all Italians learn to speak Italian.\u201d<\/p>\n

(she had a very posh Milanese accent, waiters in UK Italian restaurants \u2013 who are all southerners \u2013 leapt to attention when she spoke )<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This reminds me of a story I like to tell occasionally. Around 2001 I was in an Italian restaurant in Warrington at a leaving do for a colleague in the engineering consultancy I was working for at the time. The restaurant was staffed by charismatic dark-skinned chaps dressed in waistcoats who would pay particular attention to any ladies who happened to be dining. There were lots of theatrical arm movements and plenty of mama mias in between strings of Italian phrases, giving the place an authentic feel.<\/p>\n

Now we had a colleague, a very bright young woman called Barbara who was about four feet tall if stood on a box, and she happened to be Italian. Her idea of being on time was to turn up about half an hour late, so we were all sat down having placed our orders when she walked in. Cue lots of mama mias and other snippets of Italian as she was shown to our table and handed a menu. She read the selection for a minute or two then turned to the waiter and let loose a full sentence or two of Italian.<\/p>\n

There was a pause.<\/p>\n

The waiter looked at his colleague, who looked at Barbara and shrugged.<\/p>\n

There was another pause.<\/p>\n

Finally the waiter leaned forward and whispered in Barbara’s ear: “Sorry, we’re from Turkey.”<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the comments at Tim Worstall’s: I think I\u2019ve said this here before, my late missus (pbuh), although Austrian was born in Italy and used to say to me: \u201cYou lot might well poke fun at Mussolini for making the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[92,72],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7943"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7943"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7943\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7944,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7943\/revisions\/7944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}