They would never do that: adopt some quotation marks

We're a small sect, we who collect unnecessary quotation marks. They're the ones we find, for example, on a bar's chalkboard when they offer bread with "tomato," which makes you wonder what on earth they're rubbing the toast with if they need to mark the word orthotypographically.The reasonToday, the newspaper offered us a glorious headline: "Sánchez's allies open a knife fight among themselves." It doesn't seem like these "knives" at dawn should be a quote (although the paper tends to overuse unidentified sources for its knife fights). Well, knife fights, you know what I mean. Notice that the headline is built on a huge void. We don't know, nor are we told, who these allies are, against whom they have wielded their daggers—excuse me, their "daggers"—nor what these supposed cross-attacks have consisted of. It also fails to mention that it all stems from the Salazar affair, in which an advisor to the Moncloa Palace has been accused of sexually harassing two socialist activists. Zero substance, just the trans fats of more or less fizzy insinuations.

In fact, yesterday's headline was also quite peculiar. (Okay: "peculiar.") It said: "Sánchez 'fears' Salazar: he knows everything about his primaries." Once again, we find ourselves with quotation marks orphaned from any context. And a latent threat emerges, one they are incapable of defining. Everything? What is everything? "He is the keeper of all his secrets," they write in a subheading more fitting for a J.R.R. Tolkien fantasy novel than for journalistic prose that aims to provide facts and data. What secrets? It's very clear they want the scandal to bring down Sánchez, but they know that all they can do is suggest a tension like a brush with (palm) oil and write vague, empty headlines. Or, rather, vague, empty "headlines."