in the nick of time, I prevented myself
from committing an irreparable gaffe
The other day, on Facebook or some
such social media, I came upon a picture
of a female friend (a pretty lass, too)
outside in her garden
She was wearing a heavy coat,
and it looked like it was freezing,
so I decided to send her a text:
You look cold!
Except that these days, I hardly type anymore;
I dictate into the phone, and the text comes out
the way I say it — usually.
Incidentally, every punctuation mark must
be dictated too, so I get a lot of ribbing from
my friends — no wonder one of them calls me
Mr. Comma while another calls me New Line
New Line! — when they hear me dictate
a sentence (?!) like
What the journalist asked was colon open quote Did you know that California comma Texas comma Florida comma and New York are the largest states in the USA question mark end quote new line new line The amazed citizen open parenthesis who hails from Illinois close parenthesis answered colon open quote I had no idea exclamation mark exclamation mark exclamation mark end quote
(Of course, even if you are not mumbling,
there is the risk of a "typo" — just a day or two ago,
a friend told me he had no idea what I was talking about,
turns out that the word "statist" in my SMS had ended up as "status" —
so you better fact-check yourself)
Back to my brush with death:
My sentence was so short and uncontroversial
that I hardly took a second look at it
Right before I hit the Send button,
I did fact-check myself, and then
I nearly spit my coffee all over the screen.
Can you imagine how my friend would have
reacted if she had received a message reading:
"You look old"?!
So raise your coffee mug, and drink a toast
to your friend Erik, who managed to save
his life in the nick of time.
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