From a boston.com article on two male college students currently in hot water over a peeping-tom video they made of two female students in an adjascent dormitory:

“We in no way meant to embarrass them,” he said. “We didn’t understand the severity of the situation when we were taping it.”

While it’s clear (I think) that he meant for “it” to refer to an antecedent that doesn’t show up in the quote — it = the girls being intimate — out of context it prompted in my head a bizarre guess-and-check process as my brain tried to work out a couple of options:

- it = “the situation” as an odd, awkward way to describe the girls doing their thing (what that is is [reasonably enough] left vague in the article; “lay in bed together” and “their intimate encounter” is how the reporter describes it). It’d make the statement reasonable but the phrasing is too weird. Plus, it makes girls-fooling-around something about which they didn’t realize a degree of severity. The severity of lesbian tomfoolery? Doesn’t scan.

- it = “the situation” as a way to describe the students watching the girls. But that’s bizarre too, of course: aside from the literal impossibility of “taping the situation of us taping the girls”, the possible “taping the situation of us watching the girls” is also just to weird to seriously consider.

Which is a long way to go to say that the obvious reading is the correct one and the lack of a clear antecedent for “it” is just a blip of poor (and possibly extemporaneous) speech. The missing antecedent itself might have been in the sentence that preceded the bit quoted in the article, for that matter, mitigating the weirdness I’m on about even further.

But it made me blink; while I didn’t seriously consider either of those alternate readings as what the student meant, my brain did a double-take on the sentence and at least, in some fuzzy sense, put those parsings on the table.