This piece recounts the day’s most stationary chase: a title that refuses to be a title and an article that pretends to know where it’s going. If you come across any common sense, don’t feed it: it bites by the second sentence.
It all began at 6:02, when the title slipped off the front page to hide in the body. We saw it bolt between two commas, chased by this very article you’re reading — which, let us note, knows perfectly well that the image of a sprinting comma is, at best, a warm-up for the absurd. Here, coherence wears slippers and is always late, but we print anyway: one must give curiosity its breakfast.
On the scene, witnesses oscillate between punctuation and coffee. “I now refuse to attach myself to anyone,” a comma allegedly sighed under anonymity, before being brought to heel by a straight quotation mark. More prosaically, a morning reader maintains: “I saw the title jump the subhead and speed off in italics.” And the expert urgently consulted, Professor J. Devant-Derrière (Observatory of Runaway Sentences), rules: “We are facing an acute case of a delayed-action title: it gets it into its head to get lost in order to be better read.”
In the newsroom, we tried the standard procedure: string a subhead net, set down a saucer of capital letters, hum the little opening summary to lure it in. Nothing works. The article, aware that it’s causing trouble, attempts mediation with itself: this paragraph, for instance, exists mainly to confess that it exists only because we were asked for three to four paragraphs. We owe it to ourselves to be transparent, even when the windowpane is painted.
Finally, at 8:17, the title reappeared at the very top as if nothing had happened, feigning self-evidence, wearing the oily look of having eaten all the metaphors. It claims this was merely a rhetorical flourish and that it wanted to check whether anyone loved it enough to chase it to the bottom of the page. If you found any logic along the way, please leave it at reception: it will be adopted by a responsible paragraph. As for us, we stop the chase here: the article ends before starting again, out of simple politeness.
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