In the commuter rail terminal of Chicago’s Union Station, where I was this morning, a pleasant female voice makes frequent announcements. One of them is the following sentence:
In the interests of security, we are asking you, our passengers, to add your eyes and ears to that of our own.
The only way I can parse this is by assuming that “our own” is short for “our own young.” This allows for the interpretation that the Chicago commuter rail has children who have, collectively, not eyes and ears but one organ that functions simultaneously as an eye and an ear, and that it is asking its passengers to give up their eyes and ears, surely not an unreasonable request in the face of such mutational cruelty on the part of the universe, especially since the children are employed as station guards and their function as such is severely impaired by the lack of vision and hearing.
I am really hoping that somebody out there can come up with something better than this.
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