Quid pro...Go!

Of all the ins and outs of this gnarly impeachment thicket, there’s one thing I’m now 100 percent certain about: People need to stop saying “quid pro quo” for goodness’ sakes.

Honestly, it helps nobody. It makes the people who can’t stop repeating it look like idiots. (Washington types manage to accomplish that well enough on their own.) And it just confuses the rest of us. It must go.

First of all, nobody who isn’t a lawyer or a retired Latin teacher has the faintest clue what “quid pro quo” even means. (I looked it up. It means, in English, “How soon can he be gone?”) 

But DC news reporters seem to love the stilted phrase and can’t look away from it, like they’ve discovered a new hieroglyph on the wall of a pyramid in the Valley of the Kings. On TV and radio especially, they cannot stop saying it, as if they had all the air-time in the world.

Lawyers naturally adore any chance to pepper their speeches and documents with obscure Latinate words and phrases. For lawyers this is understandable behavior; they can bill extra hours for translating (back into English) what they’ve just written or said in the other language. Do law schools advocate this?

Saying “quid pro quo” doesn’t make you sound smart. It makes you sound lost. This is not good thinking on the part of either reporters or struggling politicians. Some of both have enough trouble coming off as smart on their best days.

Finally, the thing is hard to pronounce. Go ahead, stand in front of a mirror and try saying “quid pro quo” three times really fast, without laughing. Latin became a dead language for a reason.

This whole impeachment thing is hard enough to follow without confusing us with needless weird words. And, please, why use three words when one will do.

I say, Give us less Latin, and more plain English. Just call that Ukraine thing by what it was: Extortion.