What does it take to hit the jackpot for comments on a blog piece?

This blog attracts a sprinkling of comments but not more. Its elite group of readers (you!) are subtle and intelligent busy people who do not need to spend their day on the Internet hammering on about something or other.

Nevertheless sometimes an issue unexpectedly captures readers’ imagination and prompts a torrent of debate, much of it interesting and insightful.

Take the subject of Italian-style cottage cheese – ricotta – in Malta.

How should that foreign word be pronounced in Maltese? Does the language have any clear rules on the subject? At what point might a mispronunciation become so popular as to create a new word, which by sheer weight of usage squeezes out the earlier correct form? Do differences in pronunciation have some sort of social class identifying function?

Good questions all.

One approach is that taken by Daphne Caruana Galizia:

Many Maltese appear to have a problem with liquid consonants, letting them slip freely around a word or substituting one for another. So ricotta becomes ircotta, petrol becomes petlor, pilloli become pirmli, and yes, delfin becomes denfil..

Thanks to the stupid title of an even stupid textbook, three generations of Maltese children have grown up convinced that the Maltese word for a dolphin is denfil, instead of the more obvious – if you know other languages – and correct delfin.

A modest enough observation, one might think.

Which unleashes 455 comments, and rising.