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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). | 
