Ptahhotep Maxim 36: A Fat Wife

This is the last of the Ptahhotep Maxims and although very short this one is unusually difficult. Hardly anything matches. The transliterations are broken on different lines than the hieroglyphs, the letters and words and entire phrases do not match between things that do match, and translations do not match what I can find in the dictionaries. Maybe it's Middle Kingdom vs Old and New Kingdom, maybe it's vagaries of consensus, or simply my own shortcomings. I don't know. But this maxim is a total drag.

I think it says, if your wife is fat, if she eats twice as much as the town, and she's happy and frivolous, then just let her be. It could be a lot worse. I cannot make sense of the translation nor of the hieroglyphs on my own.

Help a brother out. What does this mean?

* If you marry a wife who is fat
* and frivolous, whom her townsfolk know,
* who is twice the norm and to whom
* spending time is precious,
* don't divorce her; let her eat,
* for her frivolity assesses the proper dose.

Does that even make sense?

But we're not done with Ptahhotep yet. There is a 7-part conclusion, and several sections are rather long. Hopefully they're not so dopey and difficult of comprehension as this last maxim.

And then after those, (you'd be mistaken to think "conclusion" means the end of it) there is a brief 2-line colophon.

What is a colophon?

It's extra scribal nonsense. And it's written in rubric red to impart undue importance.  It's Walter Cronkite saying, "And that's the way it is. This is CBS News, goodnight."