I’m sure I really blew it! In other words, I put my foot in my mouth. Talk about feeling like a jerk, Steve Martin: Eat your heart out!
What does this have to do with?
I posted an Explainer on my All About Trains site today (May 9, 2025). I titled the post: “Train Horn Warnings.” Not the first time I suffered from foot-in-mouth syndrome, if that’s what this is. Not even close!
I opened the post thus: “Funny, the things we remember.”
Then I went on to state: “I remember being on a Pennsylvania Railroad passenger train in 1964 traveling to the New York World’s Fair from Baltimore. I remember this train on which I was riding collided with a private passenger car while en route. The couple in the vehicle, meanwhile, had already exited the car and were out of harms way when the auto was struck. The car either stalled or broke down on the crossing or had somehow gotten stuck. I do not know which.”
It was only after the fact that I realized that this could possibly be misconstrued; my use of the word “funny” here was not to be taken literally. “Odd,” is what I meant.
That’s not the half of it. A couple of paragraphs later, I wrote this: “What is not comical at all, on the other hand, is the reason (or reasons — depending on what the case may be) train horn-warnings are initiated.” This no doubt could have been stated better.
Which explains why the paragraph now reads this way: “What is not unusual, on the other hand, is the reason (or reasons — depending on what the case may be) train horn-warnings are initiated.”
To reiterate, I really blew it, big time!
So, much so that in a post comment I wrote: “I just now realized that ‘funny’ probably wasn’t the best choice of words here. I used ‘funny’ here to mean ‘odd’. I felt I needed to clarify and hence the comment.”
Then again, the whole thing could be me making much ado about nothing.
If the former, my hope is for reader understanding, so I can move on, and put this whole thing behind me. Make sense?
