People say things. Some of it is immoral. Some of it is stupid. Some of it is neither, maybe just throw-away. In this case, actually, the original question

People say things. Some of it is immoral. Some of it is stupid. Some of it is neither, maybe just throw-away. In this case, actually, the original question about having a family stuck in the author's head (not in a bad way) for decades. He thought of it as a good way to introduce the next part of his story. It seems a shame to me that we're so knee-jerk politically correct that we can't allow people to not say things perfectly the first time, even when their intent was perfectly harmless.