[jack-r-abbit]

FTA: Hunt reportedly said: "Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them they cry."

Has anyone stopped to consider that he may have been talking about trouble he has actually experienced? He does say "my trouble..." not "the trouble...". Later, he went on to clarify that he has fallen in love with someone and someone has fallen in love with him. If those actually happened and they were trouble for him, then his statement is accurate. He didn't comment any more on the crying part but it doesn't sound implausible that he, at one point, criticized a woman and she cried.

[dragonwriter]

> Has anyone stopped to consider that he may have been talking about trouble he has actually experienced?

If one assumes (and I don't think that his subsequent clarifications are consistent with this interpretation) that his intent was to merely relate personal experience without generalizing further from it, then the whole affair provides a valuable lesson about why one should be precise in one's use of language and avoid using the second person ("you"), especially in a context where it might be readily be viewed as intended in its generic sense (in which it is equivalent in definition, though less formal in tone, to "one"), when one intends the first person ("I").

OTOH, I don't think it works.

> Later, he went on to clarify that he has fallen in love with someone and someone has fallen in love with him.

"People" (plural) in both cases, but what he did not say when he did so as part of his mixed apology/defense of the statement was that anything indicating that he did not intend to generalize beyond his personal experience.

> He didn't comment any more on the crying part

He did, in fact, in the same apology/defense. [0]

[0] http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-33077107

[jack-r-abbit]

See? I guess I wasn't clear enough. I meant to say: He didn't clarify if making a woman cry was a generalization or something that had actually happened to him (like the falling in love part). But yes, he did speak to it further in the context of "you need to be able to criticize people without them crying."

An equally valuable lesson is if something can be taken different ways, make sure you are taking it the same way the other person meant it. He didn't say it was or was not a generalization. He didn't say it was or was not only personal experience. Everyone just made their own assumptions.

[dragonwriter]

> An equally valuable lesson is if something can be taken different ways, make sure you are taking it the same way the other person meant it.

In English, you can be specific or generic, but it can't mean "I and only I".

Your suggested "interpretation" is a radical rewriting that even Hunt's own apology/defense doesn't offer, it just offers experience as the basis for the generalizations.

[jack-r-abbit]

> you can be specific or generic

Well... there you go. I thought when you said "you" you were specifically referring to me. But then I reread it and it turns out you were saying "[the word] you." English is a pretty complicated language. No wonder we're always pissing each other off. (Edit: "we're" was not meant to refer to specifically you and I. It was a more general "we as a people."

[Nadya]

Offense is rarely given - only taken. It doesn't matter how you meant to say something or what context you said it in. If someone wants to be offended by it, they will. [0]

[0] http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2015/01/30/...