A terribly tragic event happened in South Eastern Australia yesterday when a semi-trailer collided with a fast moving country train at a rail crossing. Many people were killed and many more hurt.

The news services have been running stories on it all day, and a nutty phenomenon is emerging: witnesses and other associated persons-of-involvement, when describing the scene of the disaster, are prone to blurt out the phrase “It was like a bomb had gone off!”

How many of these observers, I wonder, have actually seen the results of a bomb going off? Why are they using this comparison? Why, indeed, are they using any comparison at all? Surely, for the majority of these people it is most like a train colliding with a truck.