It's been a long week of partying and making love to hundreds of strangers/sitting around in my pants eating chocolate and crying (delete as applicable), but my wife is on her way home. She must never go away again. I texted her tonight as she boarded her plane, intending to call her my "precious wife", but luckily I checked the text before I sent it because I had inadvertently typed "previous". Which sends out a whole different message. Yes, you left me bereft and alone for seven days so I am afraid that I had no choice but to marry someone else. And no one in the world could blame me. I am only human.
Other husbands might not be so lucky. I wonder what terrible disasters the layout of the keyboard has caused. And how many words can change their meaning due to some fat fingers or drunken typing.
Though the word "precious" doesn't need any help in being misinterpreted due to it having two or maybe three meanings. It can mean of high value of course, but can also be used sarcastically to mean over-vaunted (him and his precious kids) or indeed it can refer to someone being a bit full of themselves and overly refined or fastidious. Knowing my wife, even though she got the correct text she'll assume it meant the latter. She's just so precious.
I don't know how many words there are that have two meanings, one very positive and one negative, but they are useful in any broken relationship. With a word like precious (if not used overtly sarcastically) you can make your partner think you're complimenting them, but actually you're insulting them. You can get through life without rocking the boat, because they will assume you're being nice, but importantly without feeling you are living a lie (because you know you actually mean the bad definition). I think that is a useful release valve and thanks to the inventors of the word "precious" for coming up with this double-meaning.
Are there any others? Aside from those rather forced examples made up by young people where you say "bad" when you mean good (yes I am talking about young people from the 1980s - I have no idea what the young people of now are saying and nor do I care). They might be useful if things ever go tits up with my first wife. Not that they have yet. No way. She's just so precious.
Language is a dangerous thing.
I had fun at the Warwick Arts Centre, though it was another gig where the numbers were a bit down on last year. Still well over 300 people which is more than fine. I had a couple of good tweets in the interval: one from someone who as a child once peed so high up a wall that he managed to be wee on his own face and another from the wife of a guy in the audience who had worked on the Colin Mcrae Rally games that also get a mention in the first half and who was a bit perturbed by what his game had ended up being used for (you'll have to see the show or the DVD to find out). It made me realise that I should probably have been getting people to tweet me their own cock-fessions/comments during the interval. I might institute that from now on. It's a bit late, but there are still 25 gigs to go in the tour (really? Surely I've done more shows than this?) so it might be a late addition.
Right, I'd better get a move on. My wife will be back in a matter of hours and the house looks like a tornado hit it and I've also got to air out a week's worth of farts. She is so lucky to have me.
