Backhanded Compliments

"You're a really good writer.  I mean, I don't actually read your blog or anything, but your stuff is pretty good."

"You've really come a long way."

"You're pretty good at basketball, for a white guy."

"Your idea is interesting.  It's heretical, but it's interesting."

"I was hoping (that other couple) would want to come out too, so our night might be fun."

"You've gotten much better looking since the last time I saw you."

"I used to think you had dumpy hair. You've improved it 100 percent."

"This brief is not the best you can do."

"You're not as big of a know-it-all jerk as I thought when I first met you."

"I'm sorry I don't feel the same way about you.  But I really respect who you are as a person."

"It's not that I don't like your girlfriend. It's that I believe in you so much that I think you can do better."

"You don't look like you're old enough to be my lawyer."

"God gave you the potential to do so much with your life. If only you had the faith to trust him."

"Congratulations on achieving a measure of success."

"You don't sound like you're from Alabama."

"You're not as dumb as you look."

What do all of these phrases have in common? 

With the exception of the last one (which is just a personal favorite), I've heard each of them at some point in my life.

Nothing sends a mixed message quite like the backhanded compliment.  It's the message that you are either better than the useless idiot you used to be, or perhaps, that you are ok but not as good as you could be, if you actually applied yourself. 

It's the art of telling someone that they are good, but only up to a point.  It's sharing in someone else's success, but with an implicit message that they not get too carried away, lest they suddenly think that they are more important than you.

It's telling someone to stand and accept recognition, but stay in their place.

Why do people say these kinds of things?  If you want someone to feel appreciated, what's the point of attaching strings to the positivity?

I seem to attract a lot of these for some reason, maybe I really did use to be an uptight weenie, and maybe because I constantly feel like I fall short of my potential.  But I suppose people usually mean well when they say these things but just don't know how to express themselves.

The people with selfish motives for saying these type of things usually have low esteem, and their backhandedness comes out of their own feelings of inferiority, so I try not to take it personally.  Other people are just socially clueless and not worthy of our frustration--by the way, these are the same people who post pointlessly argumentative things on facebook.

I sometimes marvel at how anyone could think their mixed blessings could be interpreted as anything other than an insult, but I try to just shake my head and file them away for a future blog post.  

And what about this post? 

Well, maybe it wasn't very good.  But it's better than most of the ones I've done lately. 

You don't have to tell me.