Found in Translation 2: A Short Spell Story

Usually spelling does not matter when one speaks; it does matter when one writes, dough. With e-mail, which increasingly becomes the preferred communication medium for some of us, spelling may play bad jokes. But no joke is bad if it makes you laugh. Therefore, no spelling is bad if it makes a good joke, especially if it’s on my wife six pence (psst, she controls my writings, so I dare not put the possessive noun representing her, before the terrible noun (a new type of noun for grammaticians 1,) “expense.”

A while back, we changed our living address (that place had a soul and a body; actually, many of them. The owner called them cockroaches, I call it living address.) We notified the police, about the new address not the cockroaches, but did not notify the post office. Instead, my wife wrote a kind e-mail to the person living there after us:

Dear blah-blah,

Blah-blah-blah, blah… And if any male came for me since we left, I’ll come to take it…

She asked me to proofread the message after she sent it. Too late. There was some double and even triple meaning implied, which made it a good joke. But she did not agree with the bad spelling-good joke thing. And she was blushing. I still wonder why.