Ok well not that serious, just some fragmented pieces of thought that has been floating around in the pool in my head (and will inevitably make its way into a drunken, philosophical discussion one day)

1. Men and Women
This is an an area that apprently never gets exhausted, not for me anyway. Recently Ive been watching communication between the sexes very closely, and that, paired with the common complaints from both, has brought me to new insights ::

a) The problem of women putting words in men's mouths.
Youve all heard it; here's an example :
A couple drive in a car, and a motorist comes zooming past, upon looking at the car, the man exclaims the following:
Man : "It's a woman driver!"
Woman : " What's that supposed to mean!?"
Man : "Nothing. Im just saying its a woman."
Woman : " Women can drive as well as men"
Men : "Well i didnt say otherwise."
Women : "But that's what you thought"

and they continue to argue ad nauseum about this stupid thing.

SO : the conclusion that I've come to (and this may be way off target or very obvious) Is that while the man is performing communication on a purely semantic level, the woman is tuned in on a multiple level - so this would include phonetic. The fact that he says "its a woman driver" means the emphasis would fall on the gender and the assumption that all drivers that drive well are usually male is underlying. SO while the male thought he made a simple statement, the woman pre-empted an attack of sorts and is therefore prepared to defend herself. The fact that the male does not react to the subliminal attack, leads to female to think that he is merely counteracting , using denial. And denial is a strategy used when the subject does not consider the female a worthy adversary or just could not be bothered to argue. Both these reasons would infuriate the female anyway.

But back to the levels : all this ranting basically comes down to : its not what you say, its how you say it. And I bet all of you already knew that. i think i'd write a full report on this one day , but at the moment Im too smitten to think of real reasons why men and women don't understand each other. :)