I’ve always been fond of understatement, and I’m known a certain laconic insouciance, so I was impressed by the spokesperson of the Massachusetts State Police, who recently, in reference to an axe that fell off a truck on I-95 and lodged in someone’s windshield, that it “could have been worse”. Now, the phrase “it could have been worse” is sort of pointless when you stop to think of it because yes, there is always some way to make any situation, no matter how disastrous, slightly worse.
But to say that a situation that started with an axe flying through a windshield and ended with a passenger being a bit shaken up might have gone more badly is going the extra mile. I mean, what if two axes had lodged in that poor person’s windshield? Imagine how shaken the passenger would have been. And that’s just off the top of my head. I could probably come up with a few other ways things could have ended up worse, given a few minutes.