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Reader question:

What does this headline – Quality, There's the Rub (Wall Street Journal, December 11, 2008) – mean?

My comments:

Basically, it means there's not much quality to talk about.

"There's the rub" is the idiom in question here. This phrase, which was introduced, or rather popularized by none other than the great William Shakespeare, is often used as a tempering counter point to an argument that has just been made during a conversation.

First, Shakepeare. In Hamlet, he wrote these now famous lines:

"To be, or not to be – that is the question…To die, to sleep. To sleep – perchance to dream: Ay, there's the rub. For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause."

What Hamlet meant to say is essentially this: To die and sleep forever may be a good idea (because life is a nightmare, with all the pain and misery that's in it, let alone murder and intrigue). But the trouble is that there might be bad dreams in death (perpetual sleep) too. And therefore, sighs the prince, "Ay, there's rub" – That's the difficulty, the hindrance, the contradiction.

In other words, the "rub" is the thing that makes the previous argument less valid. "Rub" originally refers to a bump in an otherwise smooth surface. In the game of golf, for example, they call a bump in the golf course "the rub of the green" (meaning luck, referring to the unpredictability of the ball after hitting small bumps under the seemingly smooth green grass).

Without further ado, here are media examples of this widely used expression:

1. Do newspapers still need The Associated Press? And does The Associated Press still need newspapers?

Until recently, these would have been ridiculous questions. But print circulation is tumbling. So is advertising revenue. Editors are slashing budgets and making do with less. Readers are moving online, where they get all the national and international news, sports scores and celebrity gossip they can read – for free, updated constantly, and often by AP.

And there's the rub. Long joined at the hip, AP and the member newspapers that own it are seeing their relationship tested like never before.

On the one hand, AP copy accounts for up to 40% or more of many a daily paper"s news content. On the other, the not-for-profit collective is also part of an online news revolution that's killing the newspaper business. The growing battle raises questions about what the AP – and the industry itself – will look like in the 21st century.

- Down on the Wire, Forbes.com, February 13, 2008.

2. Almost no one is happy with how the Rockets have played. All of us keep waiting for them to turn a corner.

"Until we get everyone on the basketball court, it remains to be seen how good we can be," Tracy McGrady said.

There's the rub.

"You never know who you're going to have on the team any given night," Aaron Brooks said. "It seems like when someone comes back, someone else goes out."

- Real Rockets remain work in progress, Houston Chronicle, December 18, 2008.