"Deadline?" I asked. "Friday's edition," he responded.
"I'll have it on your desk pronto," I bravely replied.
As promised, I had the copy on his desk at the agreed time, and awaited an email acknowledgment.
Instead, I received a telephone call from the editor's secretary, requesting that I pop in to the newsroom, because the editor urgently wanted to see me.
"Your copy," he said, when I presented myself. "I don't get it," he murmured tersely, appearing mystified.
"You've written just the one word 'rugby,' 400 times. How the hell do you think I can publish that?" he asked.
"Sorry," I cautiously replied. "Haven't I broken up the sentences enough?"
"No, your grammar's OK - but you've just repeated the one word 'rugby,' without any other content."
"I thought I'd summed up the zeitgeist of the country rather succinctly," I said, defending my prose.
'But, but ... a whole column consisting of one repetitive word?" he spluttered.
"Ah!" I responded, smiling adroitly, "but what a word! When rugby hysteria rules, you cannot repeat it enough times - simply to keep up with the nation's overwhelming desire to swoon every time one mentions the most sacred word in our vocabulary."
"You're not waspishly suggesting rugby's a bit boring, are you?" suggested a sub-editor who'd joined the conversation.
"Hush! Wash your mouth out!" I scornfully protested.
"It's true, there may be a few mugwumps who believe all this World Cup stuff continuously bombarding our senses is excruciating torture, but such no-hopers are clearly a minority and should be dismissed without further thought," I suggested decisively.
"So, if we publish this, what are you going to write about next week?" my editor asked, pensively.
"What other word is there to repeat - ad nauseam for the next few weeks?" I asked.
