A mid-September column generated more reader response than from any I’ve written in ages, no doubt because I made glaring errors while lashing out at others for doing so.

It’s a common trap to hold up oneself as an expert only to be gunned down by sharpshooters who see an easy target.

And talk about easy. The more bumptious one is, I admit, the more of a bumpkin one appears.

Just take that particular column, which recognized the effects of other people’s writing mistakes while not making mention of the ones committed in the column itself. I did not heed the words of this saying: “Be aware that a halo has to fall only a few inches to be a noose.”

Several readers pointed that out in no uncertain terms. “I really take no spiteful pleasure in correcting your corrections, and I hope this letter gives no offense,” one Old Town reader wrote. “We share an interest in preserving clarity of communication.”

She did say, however, before she used the column as a teaching aid in her high school English class, that she needed to clarify some confusion about word usage, in particular my confusion about hearty/hardy and deserts/desserts.

“Finally, the way you make one other correction seems to create more confusion than it solves,” she wrote. “I suppose your use of ‘lead’ in that sentence is intended to suggest that a writer who could confuse lying and laying would also confuse led and lead. However, the reader who regards you as the arbiter of language correctness might very well miss the irony and assume that lead is correct as you’ve used it.”

No one could miss the irony here … or the noose tightening.

Another reader, from Bangor, scratched his head and cited the column’s mistakes: “Your recent column on the misuse of some English words had me puzzled, I must confess,” he wrote. “You see, in Maine, we all eat hearty meals. Dinner may be supper and lunch may be dinner, and meals may be taken in the ‘dinning’ room, but most meals are hearty, eaten by hardy souls who work hard for a living. At least I always thought so. Your piece had me wondering, momentarily, if I’d always mistakenly applied the words.”

He didn’t; I did, as another Bangor resident reminded me by quoting Random House Webster’s College Dictionary’s definitions of hearty/hardy. “I am also a grammar, spelling, and usage fanatic,” she said. “Sorry to correct you!”

A final postcard from another reader noted two errors. “Just deserts is quite correct and refers to rewards, punishments, etc. deserved … and a hearty meal is one that is ample or abundant,” he wrote on the back of the card.

For the life of me, I can’t explain those mistakes when surely I knew – or should have known – better than to commit them. Maybe James Whitcomb Riley provides the explanation:

“An’ the Gobble-uns’ll git you Ef you don’t watch out.”