Someone once said to me, "Billy, if you were wrong about it, you could never have been certain of being right about it."
Oh, the perils of perfectionism! It's one thing to inexcusably rely on a spell-checker to perform substantive editing tasks; it's quite another to think yourself invincible when it comes to the literal.
For quite some time, I've had a gnawing feeling in my stomach over letting stand—without double checking—my use of the word kowtow. Yep. You guessed it. While the context is not important, the point is I wrote that someone I knew was "cow towing" to the wishes of someone else! To those of us who are sticklers about proper word usage, this is blasphemous—to say nothing of hilariously stupid! I stand defrocked as an aspiring perfectionist of word use and now assume my much-deserved assignment as a dictionary dolt. My shame is boundless!
As penance, I will rent a tow truck, borrow a cow, tie the cow to the towing rig, drive around my neighborhood and offer myself up for derision. What the hell. It sure beats having to say five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys.
