McLeod and Herndon (1980: 156) suggest that double entendre or doppiu sens emerged due to TV and radio censorship. The use of double entendre may have been strengthened by censorship, but it is doubtful whether the use of metaphors derives from this. On the contrary, the clever, crafty, and insinuating use of metaphor is an essential part of the weaponry of għana.

Ciantar (1994), following Friggieri (1979) has pointed out that the octosyllabic verse had been identified as early as 1851 as "the most suitable verse" for Maltese poetry.

Mintoff was a charismatic, and divisive, populist leader. For a perceptive and balanced account of Mintoff's oratory see Boissevain, 1994 (b) This song recites his political achievements, and rationalises his political volte-faces.

Resentment was magnified by the fact that these were middle class Maltese bent on having fun, as they saw it, at their expense. There is a long tradition of Gozitan resentment of Maltese day trippers treating them as 'peasants'.

Often these cultural composite forms are celebrated by a composite vocabulary itself seen as 'odd' or a 'travesty' by linguistic purists.

Similarly since the late 19th century Andalusians attempted to portray Andalusia as a 'paradisiacal conviviality of Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Gitanos, at least until fifteenth-century Madrid unleashed its iron-fisted program of cultural homogenization' (Washabaugh ibid: 79). A past could thus be confabulated from which flamenco was both a 'survival' and an expression of unsupressible regional otherness in the Lorcaean tradition.

For an interesting account of the manufacture of nostalgia as a site in Japan in the form and image of furusato, ("the old village") cf Robertson, 1995.