There are plenty of cases where badly aimed criticism (or unsolicited advice that gets interpreted as criticism) veers into abuse.
In a statement on Friday, Mr. Greenspan said his testimony should not have been interpreted as criticism.
For Federer and his entourage, this might have been the sweetest of all 13 titles, given the growing news-media concern that the family mistakenly interpreted as criticism.
"At any rate, we have withdrawn the content from the internet and apologise if it was interpreted as criticism of the country".
"Historically, appointing an outsider to GCHQ tends to be interpreted as criticism," says Richard Aldrich, professor of international security at the University of Warwick.
To the extent that his insults could be interpreted as criticism, it was directed at the insufficient realism of the paintings.
Although he refuses directly to endorse any candidate for the Labour leadership, he also makes a number of comments which are likely to be interpreted as criticism of Ed Miliband, vying with his brother David in a contest which reaches a climax as party members receive their ballot papers on Wednesday.
Ramos had questioned the commitment of his Spanish team-mates to the national cause, comments widely interpreted as criticism of Fabregas and his Chelsea team-mate Diego Costa who did not make the recent Spain squad for the Euro 2016 qualifier against Belarus because of hamstring injuries.
This language has been interpreted as criticism of Mr. Putin, though tepid and indirect, fanning increasingly heated discussion of a possible rift between the leaders that has made Mr. Khodorkovsky's trial into a litmus test of Mr. Medvedev's commitment to the rule of law and a window into the power dynamic between the president and Mr. Putin.
In a comment that could be interpreted as criticism of her party's decision to pursue a referendum in 2014, when only a third of Scots said they would vote to leave the UK,, she added: "Setting the date for a referendum before a majority of the Scottish people have been persuaded that independence [is] the best future for our country is the wrong way round".
Moreover, Nazarbayev himself tends to praise China for pursuing a policy that is "aimed against hegemonism" (quoted in Engvall and Cornell, 2015: p. 68), which could be plausibly interpreted as criticism of Russian neo-imperialism.
