The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

1. Deja Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?

Ever experience deja vu?

You know, the feeling that you've seen something before, even when you're seeing it for the first time?

Well, if you're a reader of The Wall Street Journal, what you're actually experiencing this week is "deja vu deja vu" -- the experience of experiencing deja vu over and over again.

How do we at the Five Dumbest Things Research Lab know you have this condition? Well, it's because we at the lab read The Wall Street Journal. And we got it, too.

It all started innocently enough Monday, when a huge Journal headline proclaimed, "Stock Rally Seems Like Deja Vu." We shrugged our shoulders and moved on.

But on Tuesday, what once seemed unimportant turned sinister. First came the headline "Deja Vu at ABC: Summer Reruns." Then, in an essay about Oracle's (ORCL) hostile bid for PeopleSoft (PSFT), we read, "Now, the corporate world, as Yogi Berra would put it, looks like deja vu all over again."

Ga-Ga for Deja Parlez vous deja vu?

No, we told ourself. There's no larger pattern here. There's nothing to fear. Or so we thought until Wednesday morning, when we picked up the paper to read Cynthia Crossen's occasional column. The one called "Deja Vu."

Yikes! Forget about deja vu all over again -- what we've got is deja vu all over the place. Ubiquitous deja vu. A plethora of deja vu. A surfeit of it. Those Journal folks must be pretty serious about living in the past.

As for more useful conclusions re the source of d.v.d.v., we have our guesses. "Deja vu" is a fancy way of saying "history repeats itself," and it takes up less space in a headline. It also gives copy editors a chance to show off their mastery of accents grave and aigu. (Just so you know, that's an aigu over the "e" in "deja" and a grave over the "a.")