Gah! Reviewer!

I have a paper undergoing peer review. The first review came back and now we are formulating a rebuttal. I am find myself writing "the referee misunderstood" and "I cannot understand the referee" an awful lot. At some point this made me start to wonder if our paper is really hard to understand, but the referee also insists we made a sign error ('+' vs '-') which is not the case.

Put the argument into a concrete shape, into an image, some hard phrase, round and solid as a ball, which they can see and handle and carry home with them, and the cause is half won. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson