Sunday, March 21, 2004

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Headline Allusions Sometimes I wonder how many people "get" headline allusions/puns/double entendres. I feel like I get a high percentage of them, but I feel like I have an unusually high affinity for this sort of thing. For instance, today's Maureen Dowd column is entitled "Quid Pro Quack". Its subject is the duck-hunting trip Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia took with Dick Cheney, and others, and Scalia's refusal to recuse himself from the upcoming Supreme Court case involving Cheney. So the "base" intent of the headline is to indicate the subject involves a "quid pro quo", a Latin phrase used to describe a situation in which there is a clear-cut, if not always explicit, exchange of favors. The allusion cleverly riffs on this well-known phrase, by opportunitistically playing on the fact that the issue in question involves the bird that goes "quack". "Quack" suggests another well-known phrase "if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, then it's probably a duck". This phrase is most often heard in connection with corruption and ethics considerations, so it obviously fits the writer's intention here: she is suggesting, despite Scalia's twenty-one page "dissent", that if it "quacks like" a quid pro quo, it is a quid pro quo. 11:50:41 AM    comment []