Interpreting "you're hurting me" as "I am a big bad meanie and you will regret crossing me" is indeed baffling and irritating behaviour in apparently reasonable people. For me that interpretation combined with carrying on the interaction that is causing pain pretty directly makes me re-evaluate my view of how reasonable the person actually is; YMMV. (And yes I did get the implication that these were people you knew in real life too; one is generally quicker to dismiss random strangers behaving poorly than those nearer ones monkeyspehere.)
"The devil's advocate" is another of those phrases which gets dropped as a phrase to excuse all sorts of things which really aren't "playing the devil's advocate" the way the phrase was historically used; I've not explicitly come across it used to excuse trolling, but it doesn't surprise me that people try to do so.
Ewen
PS: Formative years of hanging out in groups regularly bothered by trolls has possibly made me a little hair trigger on deciding someone is "acting like a troll". I do tend to treat it a bit like Godwin's Law though.
Re: People "not letting it go"
"The devil's advocate" is another of those phrases which gets dropped as a phrase to excuse all sorts of things which really aren't "playing the devil's advocate" the way the phrase was historically used; I've not explicitly come across it used to excuse trolling, but it doesn't surprise me that people try to do so.
Ewen
PS: Formative years of hanging out in groups regularly bothered by trolls has possibly made me a little hair trigger on deciding someone is "acting like a troll". I do tend to treat it a bit like Godwin's Law though.