| The fine art of giving a compliment English speakers tend to be profuse with their compliments. "Have you been working out? Because your head looks a lot smaller. "Has anyone told you that you look like a celebrity? You look just like… (insert name of drug-addled pop star/reality show bozo/any celebrity of the opposite gender here). When it comes to compliments, perhaps the Japanese speaker in a David Sedaris essay has it figured out best. She once tried to make a female relative feel better about her looks by telling her that she had "very striking features. I'll wait here. Don't follow it, or you'll wind up saying stuff like these actual misguided compliments, names withheld to protect the dumb:. "You have big eyes…like an alien. His Japanese friend tells him not to bother mentioning specifics: [Y]ou'd just say 'I like,' and let the other person figure out what you're talking about," he advises. What an easier time we would have if we just walked up to people and said, "I like…" and then stopped there. Sedaris, living in Japan for a few months, wants to know how to compliment someone's shirt in Japanese, a notoriously indirect language. Once when I was at the hairdressers', the girl shampooing my hair told me I had hair like a horse. I was sure it was a sincere compliment 30 minutes later, when she suddenly appeared behind my chair with a paddle brush and asked the stylist if she could help brush my hair. You know, like the president of Iran. " (If you don't understand why this is bad, please go and look up a picture of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. |
Thursday, 7 June 2012
The fine art of giving a compliment
