The car horn is like a lovely word defiled. It was never meant to be profane. It was never meant to be deployed only in a rage or in a hurry by our dumb and vulgar selves. It's just a signal. A safe driver, if she were driving safely, would honk her horn -- quick taps -- maybe once an hour: when a schoolchild or squirrel threatened to enter the road; when she approached a man pulling out of his driveway but couldn't make eye contact; when lingering for too long, perhaps because of traffic, in another car's blind spot.

I know this because Bob told me eight years ago. Bob taught me how to drive: Before I could get my license I was required by law to enroll in a behind-the-wheel driver training program and people said his was the best.

At an appointed time he picked me up in a modest sedan with one of those giant pizza-delivery prisms on the roof that broadcast both the name of his driving school and my dangerous incompetence. We had three sessions of two hours each. I drove around the suburbs and Bob talked nonstop the whole time about the micromechanics of driving and traffic accidents and the role of body language at intersections and the true purpose of the highway shoulder and the way you're supposed to ease the wheel back, after a sharp turn, with a "controlled slip." Then he took me to the DMV for the practical test and I passed.

All of Bob's students passed. For the hardest part, the parallel parking, he had a trick. On his car's back right window he stuck a New Jersey Devils decal. When it came time to parallel park, you were to pull up until the back of the decal was aligned with the parking spot's front left cone. You turned the wheel clockwise as far as it could go, looked out the back windshield, and stopped exactly when another sticker -- I forget what that one was -- was aligned with the back right cone. Finally you spun the wheel fully counterclockwise, eased back, and straightened out.

When they gave me my license I left in a hurry, eager a...