Cambridge’s Farah Ahmed: study engineering ‘to produce weaponry for Jihad’

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Does Poland have an image problem?

I don’t exercise much, except my self-control. To wit: ten times a week, I bite back the urge to grab someone by the lapels and holler my guiding life philosophy, and favourite line from Friends: ‘By the way: y-o-u-apostrophe-r-e means ‘you are’. Y-O-U-R means YOUR!’ Like most of my opinions, this one is trivial, curmudgeonly and no doubt doomed to failure. Top of my list of grumbles, penned in italics and painted scarlet red: people should be able to spell. Is that too much to ask?  I say, no. And the fact that we’ve reached such lows is baffling. Pundits like to decry the death of book reading, but in many ways, we’re the most literate society to ever exist. We spend about 60 days a year on our phones, gobbling up subtweets, Instagram captions and bitchy WhatsApps. Six years after the pandemic, millions of us still Wordle daily.  We read like crazy, yet spell like Manuel from Fawlty Towers. I’ve had texts from well-read contacts, talented chaps with squadrons of degrees, that sound like they’ve suffered some sort of crippling stroke. Grammar, logic, spelling — all thrown to the wind, and I’m left........

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