Meaning of cornfield meet | Babel Free

Definitions

An accidental head-on collision or near head-on collision of two trains.

US, euphemistic

Examples

“Do you think it's possible for two trains to have a cornfield meet right in the middle of an automatically protected block? Of course it is, if one of the hoggers is drunk or asleep at the throttle […]”

“One such instance when a conductor failed to follow a prescribed timetable resulted in a head-on smashup on the Long Island Railroad at the end of the Civil War. On August 28, 1865, General Grant and General Sherman collided in a pasture at Jamaica, New York. Five passengers were killed in this cornfield meet.”

“[A] couple of passenger trains staged a cornfield meet in the deep cut on Mount Holly, which the road settled with "gratuities" amounting to $50,000. By this time the Rutland had built up enough financial stability to weather these incidents with a minimum of distress.”

“One hundred years ago, staged railroad accidents were popular events. […] "Head-on Joe" Connolly made a business out of "cornfield meets" holding seventy-three events in thirty-six years.”

“[An 1899 man discovering ragtime:] [N]ow they're writing music that sounds like a cornfield meet.”

CEFR level