Judyth Vary Baker on the "Cancun/Kankun" Contretemps (Part 6 of 6)

Judyth Vary Baker discusses the claim that she was creative in discussing her plans with Lee for the future based upon alleged inconsistencies between a series of quotes. QUOTE 1 is the basic story: she had told her agent at the time, Peter Cox, that they were going to meet in the Yucatan in the vicinity of Chichen Itz. Lee had not used the name "Cancun", which, as she observes, did not exist other than in the form of the village of Kankun. She put her finger on a map at his request and he said, "Oh, Cancun!", and ran with it. Since in QUOTE 2 Martin Shackelford said what had happened (how the misunderstanding had arisen), there is certainly no inconsistency there. And QUOTE 3 is one where Judyth is being more specific about what they (she and Lee) had actually discussed, where QUOTE 4 expands on their tentative plans. Mexico is a predominantly Catholic country, of course, so they would expect to be married by a priest. I discussed each of the quotes with Judyth and, the more we talked about it, the more it became apparent to me that this arose from violating the condition of translation known as "the principle of charity", where you should (in ordinary conversational contexts) look for interpretations that make what is said hang together the right way. It does.