With close to fifteen-thousand pieces to my magnum opus, I have to be ever-more careful with their titles, for the rule that I adopted early on was that they should never repeat. Whence the ubiquitous “again” in so many titles, of course. Whenever a title strikes me as just right even though I have used it already, I add the magical word after a comma. This also serves as a footnote of sorts, for it points at the original piece as a reference. If this happens twice, “again and again” is always in store, and I have used it pretty often by now. Given the inanity of this particular piece, which is only about titles, I came up with its title without much thought, but a quick search through the directory of my writings showed that it had been used already. Although the original piece was about something entirely different, which means that it cannot be used as a reference of any kind, the old expedient struck me as appropriate one more time (“Whatever,” June 18, 2000). In a few short years, the titles of many of my pieces will have funny tails—either “again” or “again and again.” Come to think of it, I have never used “again and again and again” in a title. And this strikes me as a big omission at this juncture.

Addendum (September 23, 2016)

Having come across this piece entirely by chance, I decided to go through the directory of my magnum opus in search of all the titles with either “again” or “again and again” after a comma. And I came up with one-hundred and fifty-two of the former and twenty-three of the latter kind. Not a few, but far from too many of them, either. Given that there are more than seventeen-thousand titles in the directory at present, the former account for less than one percent, while the latter are entirely negligible. As for “again and again and again,” I doubt that I will ever go for it. Too awkward by half, at least to my present taste.