Joe Innes

War is hell. People around the globe are widely in agreement on this simple statement, which is pretty impressive, seeing as we can barely agree on the day of the week most of the time. And yet, for some reason, we’ve only managed about three years without war since WWII. We’ve seen the Greek civil war, The Jewish insurgency in Palestine, the South East Asia conflicts, the Malayan emergency, the Korean war, the Anglo-Egyptian war, the Mau Mau insurgency, the...

Earlier this month, L’Académie Française issued a diktat that from this day forward, there was to be no more le hashtag and from now on it is to be referred to as a mot-dièse. This was picked up fairly widely in the media, and laughed off as another example of Frenchness. But there are other issues at stake here. The French aggressively protect their language from outside influences, mandating the use of “French” forms over loan words. They’re preserving the...