If a man says ‘yes’ he means maybe.
If he says ‘maybe’ he means no.
If he says ‘no’–he is no gentleman.
If a woman says ‘no’ she means maybe.
If she says ‘maybe’ she means yes.
If she says ‘yes’–she is no lady.
This was a favorite joke of Paul Dirac (1902-1984), a brilliant physicist so shy that his Cambridge colleagues coined a unit, the dirac, to stand for the smallest measurable quantum of speech. Dirac was what I call an Aleph male–distracted from Alpha ambitions by his private obsessions.
I met Dirac and his wonderful wife Moncie the summer before his 80th birthday. There is a famous summer school for physics in the little hilltown of Sicily known as Erice. I was a young physics wife, quite visibly pregnant. (Just one year before, my bottom was pinched black-and-blue by Sicilian men, but my little round belly got me treated me like a queen.)
I have a nerdy fondness for learning languages, so I served as an amateur guide to physicists who didn’t speak any Italian. I was delighted to be the chosen companion of a Nobel laureate for an hour or two, even if our mutual goal was to buy him some shoes. Professor Dirac was courteous but shy–and when he smiled, he had a wonderfully naughty twinkle in his eye.
I thought Moncie was a very lucky woman.