“Eet eez, how you say — zee dumb law.”

Reuters reports (“French lawmaker proposes bill to outlaw mockery of accents”) that lawmaker Laetitia Avia of Emmanuel Macron’s ruling party intends to introduce a bill adding discrimination based on accent or pronunciation (“glottophobia”) to the list of banned discrimination categories. This came after an exchange between leftist party leader Jean‐​Luc Mélenchon and journalist Véronique Gaurel, born in Toulouse, in which he appeared to make fun of Gaurel’s southwestern accent and then called for the next question to be in “comprehensible French.”


I thought of researching whether France has enacted other vaguely framed laws aimed at soothing the sensibilities of the Toulouse region. But since there is no way to search for vague laws as a category in themselves, I soon realized that might set me off on — if you will excuse the expression — a Too‐​Loose‐​Law Trek.