Two months ago I was at a dinner party that included also an academic couple. The husband made a pun during dinner that indicated he had misremembered my last name (chocolate bar in my profile notwithstanding, it’s ‘Crumple’ not ‘Crumble’), and then he was so pleased with his pun that he made references to it twice later in the dinner. Being timid, I did not correct him until the third time, which was awkward because our structural relationship is such that he really should have my surname down by this point. Yesterday at a holiday party I was standing with a colleague and the husband came over and started talking to us. As a last thing before leaving us, he apologised again for having misremembered my name. “My wife was so angry you would not believe it,” he proclaimed, “No sex for a month.”

After he left, I said to my colleague, “I wouldn’t have said anything if I’d known it was going to cost him a month of sex.”

My colleague replied, “Something I’ve learnt about him is that conversation often ends up making some reference to sex. And in ways I usually suspect are less than accurate.”