Philobiblon

… or at least on the way out.

I’ve always thought that punning headlines are written by journalists for journalists, a form of schoolboy showing off. The occasional real good one might produce a wry smile in me, but usually my response is a groan, since most of them are neither original nor interesting.

And I suspect most readers don’t notice or are at best mildly irritated by them – the way you are annoyed by the school clown showing off by taunting a new teacher when you’d rather listen to what the teacher has to say.

But as Peter Preston says in The Guardian today, Google et al are going to kill such headlines stone dead. No search algorithm, no matter how tricky, is going to understand a pun.

But some things in the media are slower to change. The Guardian profiles Quentin Letts — “Haileybury. Trinity College, Dublin and Jesus College, Cambridge” — the Daily Mail’s parliamentary sketch-writer, theatre critic and author of the paper’s new satirical column, Clement Crabbe”. The interview is conducted in, of course, his London club, where he “lives during the parliamentary season”. His wife stays back in Herefordshire.

He laughs. “I’ve got three children and a wife who has the opposite of a hosepipe ban when it comes to spraying money around. So I’ve got to make hay while the sun shines.”