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August 13, 2009

When to pay a compliment

Cowen recently said this about compliments,

There is strategy involved in giving and interpreting compliments. Let’s say you hear someone play a difficult –but not too difficult– piece on the piano, and she plays it well. Is it a compliment if you tell her she played it beautifully?

That depends. You would not be impressed by the not-so-difficult piece if you knew that she was an outstanding pianist. So if you tell her you are impressed, then you are telling her that you don’t think she is an outstanding pianist. And if she is, or aspires to be, an outstanding pianist, then your attempted compliment is in fact an insult.

This means that, in most cases, the best way to compliment the highly accomplished is not to offer any compliment at all. This conveys that all of her fine accomplishments are exactly what you expected of her. But, do wait for when she really outdoes herself and then tell her so. You don’t want her to think that you are someone who just never gives compliments. Once that is taken care of, she will know how to properly interpret your usual silence.

“If you tell a beautiful woman that she is beautiful, what have you given her? It’s no more than a fact and it has cost you nothing.But if you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty. To love a woman for her virtues is meaningless. She’s earned it, it’s a payment, not a gift. But to love her for her vices is a real gift, unearned and undeserved. To love her for her vices is to defile all virtue for her sake — and that is a real tribute of love, because you sacrifice your conscience, your reason, your integrity and your invaluable self-esteem.”

It was pretty hard to find this quote because I couldn't recall exactly how it went. I had to exclude a lot of complement searches to find just the compliment ones. That the Dr. BlueEyedGirl knows this difference is one of the many things I love about her.

Posted by OneEyedMan at August 13, 2009 8:49 AM

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