I saw Craig Biggio's wife today at this cafe down the street from our house. Garland and I were eating lunch. Mrs. Biggio was on the phone, talking to one of the parents from her daughter's softball team. They had just come from a game.

"Did your wife not call you and tell you we pulled it out in the last inning?" we overheard her ask.

"Did your wife not call you and tell you we pulled it out in the last inning?" she asked again, after a brief pause.

"Please say that again," I said, half under my breath, half to Garland, hoping Mrs. Biggio would be forced to engage in the ole "Can you hear me now?" exercise of repeating a reasonably long sentence on the phone for a third time, something that rarely happened back in the days of land lines.

Garland brought up an interesting point: if Mrs. Biggio had been forced to repeat herself again, for a third time, with people listening, she would have changed the sentence slightly, probably into something more along the lines of, "We won it the last inning," and then, once it was established that she'd gotten the crux of the message across, would likely add the detail about assuming his wife would have already called to tell him.

It's not because it's easier to understand, "We won it in the last inning" from the other end of the connection, it's because people are listening. You change it. It's funny.