What are two examples of miscommunication by Mercutio and the nurse in Romeo and Juliet?

In Act 2,
Scene 4 of , 's nurse comes looking forand finds him withand . Mercutio has
a saucy attitude during this meeting and treats the Nurse with sarcasm; he also makes use of
wordplay, twisting what she says and making fun of her. These instances are probably the ones
you'd call "miscommunications"although Mercutio is definitely misunderstanding the
Nurse on purpose in order to tease her.

Here are two examples of when that
happens:

First, the Nurse tells her servantto hand her a fan, probably
because it's warm outside (since it's the middle of the day).

But Mercutio
purposefully twists what the Nurse has asked for and says, "Good, Peter, to hide her face,
for her fans the fairer face." He means, "Yes, Peter, give her the fan because she
wants to hide her ugly face with it."

Second, in the next moment, the
Nurse wants to be formal, but she's not very well-spoken. She says to the boys, "God ye
good morrow, gentlemen." She's trying to greet them in a very polite way, but she actually
wished them a good morning even though it's already afternoon.

Of course,
Mercutio knows what she intends to say. (He knows that she's trying to greet the boys and say
hello.) But he makes fun of how she says it and fires back a correction: "God ye good e'en,
fair gentlewoman." He means, "Good AFTERNOON, lady."

In both
of these examples, if you had called Mercutio out on how he was treating the Nurse, he might get
defensive and argue that they were just miscommunicating. But he definitely knows what he's
doing and uses his superior wit and intelligence to mess with the Nurse on purpose.

In general, if your instructor asks you find examples of a certain kind of verbal
exchange between two or more characters, your best bet is to start skimming the text until you
find those characters talking to each other. Then, look carefully at what they say and how they
say it. Your instructor's point is probably not just to get you to identify how the characters
are talking to each other or what they're saying; the point is probably to help you notice how
examples like this develop .

In this case, when we look at the two examples
above, by thinking about how "miscommunications" play out between Mercutio and the
Nurse, we realize that Mercutio is really a smart-aleck and needs to learn to cool it, and we
also learn that the Nurse is not as wise as we'd hope she would be because she's pretty much the
only one that Juliet can turn to for advice. Now we understand the characters a little bit more
by looking closely at how they interact with each other.