Too dim for the internet?

OUR changing language. Or, to be strictly accurate, the Germans' changing language which we might consider adopting. Our Teutonic cousins have started referring to youngsters using iPads and smartphones as Generation Kopf unten, the heads-down generation. Very apt.

SADLY, we will never know the answer to the most intriguing question in Ireland's referendum on gay marriage: how would the clergy of Craggy Island have voted? I suspect Father Ted would have been a No, Jack would have been a Yes and Dougal would have gone to the police station instead of the polling station.

YOU need a licence to drive a car. Maybe you should also need a licence to use the internet. The Coleen Nolan teacup-squall reveals a worrying number of dangerous dimwits who do not have the intellect to follow a simple argument but have the power, via social media, to inflict their views on the world.

NOLAN, presenter of Loose Women (ITV), was discussing the case of the Northern Ireland bakery run by Christians who refused to make a cake for a gay customer who wanted a decoration supporting same-sex marriage. This is what she said: "What if somebody walked in and said: 'Right, I want a cake and I want the whole Islamic State on it – and how I support it, and how I support them killing our people.' Because it is a business do they have to make it?" You could call Nolan's thought- process philosophy or analogy but I like the name they use in Ireland: Whatiffery.

THE gay-cake case lends itself to endless whatiffery: What if a Jew asked a Muslim cake shop to decorate a cake with the flag of Israel? What if a witch asked a Catholic cake shop to decorate a cake with a pagan symbol? And so on. The issue is about equality and conscience. But barely had the words left Coleen Nolan's mouth than the e-hordes were demanding she be sacked. This, uncorrected, is a typical email: "Coleen Nolan shouldn't be allowed to work on TV again. She has a large audience and believes gay rights and ISIS are one in the same?" Of course she doesn't. No sane person does. But once these cyber witch-hunts begin, led by the thickos and those zealots desperate to take offence, they are like the street mobs of old and it is hard to stand up against them without being denounced for the same crime. When it comes to sensible debate, this country is bad and getting worse. French schools teach their kids philosophy and debate. Ours should, too.

IN these unshockable times, few things make a theatre audience gasp out loud. But it happens three times in the new Merchant of Venice at Stratford-upon-Avon as the strutting, Jew-hating merchants spit in the face of Shylock. I have no idea how you train actors to spit in a colleague's face at close range, nor how the actor, the Palestinian star Makram Khoury, endures it, wiping away the spit patiently, show after show, night after night. Maybe it's essential to the plot but it seems bizarre in an age when responsible employers arrange winter flu jabs for their staff, that spitting in your workmate's face is okay.

STRANGELY, one of the few characters who doesn't spit on Shylock is the jester, Launcelot Gobbo.