How dare you people post in this thread! :mad:
Ha, that one really made me chuckle. I can imagine that little scene playing out in a film, with no further explanation.
One time a friend said “You’re very beautiful in the face.”
I heard: “Your body is ugly/too fat.”
(It’s that comment overweight women get–you have a pretty face, if you could just lose some weight too.)
As far as offense at weird things, here’s an uncomfortable one between me, mom, and my father’s mom.
me: Hey Mom, how did Pop propose to you?
mom: <hem, haw> didn’t really answer
g’ma: You know, these are really personal questions you’re asking.
I am used to hearing proposal stories and had no idea. And it can’t be that they were in flagrante at the time since Mom was very observant Catholic.
This says to me that the circumstances are too embarrassing for your mom to retell, even if it wasn’t in flagrante, and your grandmother’s covering for her with a white lie.
Really? So if I was in a similar accident that resulted in that type of injury, but the driver happened to be sober, I can never understand? Right.
Hmmmm, did Grandpa have a shotgun? How does the math work out?
I was 16 before I did the math and figured out how my parents decided to tie the knot. . .
Yeah, but you wouldn’t need the extra leg room for something like that. Particularly while you were in the bucket. Therefore, you’d have no idea what sort of hell that woman was suffering through.
Nailed it.
Sounds like you got a call from Incredulous Ed.
My husband’s maternal grandmother was a font of these things. She managed to get offended very regularly. Among the most epic:
When my husband was born, his parents wanted to give him first and middle names that had associations with his father’s family, and that sounded good together. When the maternal grandma, let’s call her Ava, found out, she pitched a sulk-fit that was only alleviated when they agreed to give him a *second *middle name from her side of the family. So my poor husband has four names, which never ever fit on forms properly. Some of his official stuff has all four names, but most have only three, leaving out the name from Ava’s family.
So when my husband had his master’s thesis printed, he went to considerable trouble and expense at the last minute to get authorization to put his full name on it. (It seems it’s not trivial to do up your thesis under any variation of your name other than what you registered for college with.) He wanted to give Ava a copy because she was so proud of him: she herself had never graduated high school, though she was married to a professor, and my husband got his MS at the same semi-prestigious university where *her *husband got his degrees. In fact, my husband’s parents met at this same university. Both parents and Ava’s husband had by this time passed away, and Ava put a lot of stock in my husband’s following in their footsteps. So it was important to give her this token of his scholarship with her family name included on the cover and a special note about her in his acknowledgments at the front.
She sulked anyway after he gave it to her (and really, she could sulk a sulk sulkier than any sulky four-year-old I’ve ever met). While he had specifically thanked Ava in the acknowledgments, my husband had written the *dedication *to his late parents and grandfather, in memoriam. She interpreted this as a deliberate slight on his part… he didn’t include her in the dedication, too, from her point of view, clearly because he was ashamed of her lack of education. :rolleyes: He felt terrible. I never came so close to ripping her a new one as then. Fortunately I remembered in time that at age 96, she wasn’t about to change a lifelong habit of seriously expert passive aggression just because her granddaughter-in-law got peeved, and I saved my breath.
That I can understand. Sometimes one qualifier too many can ruin a particularly good compliment. Like: “You are really pretty!” ends up being much more complimentary than “Your face is really pretty!” The specificity implies that other elements are not so pretty.
But in the case of the girl I knew, apparently everything I said was interpreted as a slam in one way or the other. Like if I admired her really cool 1970s retro coffee table: “This is so awesome! My parents had one of these!” She would hear: “What junk! My parents threw theirs out!”
To this day I actually feel really bad that she felt that way around me. The friends we had in common did stick up for me when she finally got really mad and told me off for all the years I was “so mean” to her. Apparently she’d been working up the courage to ask me on a date for months, and when I happily introduced her to my new girlfriend, oblivious clod that I was, I made her feel like a worm. So no nice thing I ever said was ever actually heard in the “spirit of niceness”, it was heard through a filter of “inadequacy”.
Worst-case scenario of a younger twin with a complex.
Actually, don’t watch that clip, or if you do, start at 2:50. It’s the conclusion of a video game where the protagonist meets his twin, who accuses the protagonist of pushing him aside in the womb in order to be born first.
In a crowded narrow aisle in a hotel lobby in Detroit I casually remarked, “They need to make this place wider.” A large black woman said, “Excuse me?!” I realized about a minute later that she had said that right to me. Then it occurred to me that she probably heard “whiter” when I said “wider.” In hindsight, I should have looked at her and said, “just a couple of feet wider?”
I used to work at a print shop run by a husband and wife, and she was hot tempered. When I started working there, the server had been divided into two sections, Server and Old Server. The old one had frequently used files, such as customer logos, fonts, business card templates, etc. They suggested I rename Old Server to something that made more sense. I suggested “Common Files,” for it was very common for us to access those files and many jobs had those files in common. The idea being that most jobs would have a file path right to the common, y’know, file. She became really offended. She lectured me about “what if a customer saw that their files were kept in that folder!” She said that people would see the word “common” and think “commoners” and that we were insulting them. Ultimately, they went with "Master A couple of years later, I left that job because of an abusive coworker. And he, instead of following my method of calling the customer’s files “Originals,” he would name those folders things like “Customer Crap” or “Customer Shit.” I really hope that they unknowingly sent some big customers a disk with that stuff on it.
You could always say “Really? Wow! I was crippled in an accident when I was drunk driving—maybe we’ve met!” 
Actually I think this one wins.
Or maybe she thought you were making a comment about her size??
My wife is easily offended by just about anything. If you breath wrong or have an odd facial expression she’s offended.
It’s a pleasant personality trait.
Shit, I’ve had people get offended just because I don’t share their personal preferences on pointless things that don’t affect them one way or the other. Music and food seem to be the big issues, and I try not to engage in pissing matches over trivial shit, but some people just can’t let it go so I end up saying something offensive:
“No, I’m originally from Chicago, and we don’t put ketchup on our hot dogs.”
“I’m sorry, but Slash isn’t fit to carry Angus Young’s luggage.”
The usual response: “Fuck you, snob!”
:mad: Racist! Anti-Semite! :mad:
No, you should have said “I said wider, not whiter. Sorry I’LL SPEAK UP, SINCE YOUR SONAR DOESN’T SEEM TO BE WORKING CORRECTLY”
I’m a bastard.