Backhanded Compliments

The more I see of men, the better I like my dog. —Frederick the Great, giving his dog a backhanded compliment.

Kelvan responding to an insincere compliment.

Source: J. Krueger

Let a childhood memory kick off this discussion. When I was a little boy, my greatest wish was to get a toy tractor for the holiday. Santa Claus obliged, but something went wrong in transit from the North Pole. Some part was broken or in the wrong place. A mechanical issue. My maternal grandmother of blessed memory fixed it right away. I was astounded. I said, "A woman can do that, and such an old one?!" Rather than taking offense (I was too small), my family burst out laughing and preserved the episode in many retellings, conveniently not asking where I might have gotten such sexist and ageist ideas. The point is that I gave Oma Marie a backhanded compliment.

Merriam-Webster defines a backhanded compliment as “a compliment that implies it is not really a compliment at all.” The Urban Dictionary does a better job: “An insult disguised as a compliment.” Here we see what Merriam-Webster hides, namely the distinction between the utterance’s apparent and true nature. The Urban Dictionary continues with apt examples. Here are two of them: “No honey ... I love yours. I don’t even like them big.” “Your haircut really slims your face.” They top it off with a self-referential example: “Since Michael is a pompous prick, I think I’ll give him a backhanded compliment.”

A post on consulting.com provides an excellent introduction to different kinds of backhanded compliments, how to recognize them, and how to respond. The post lists seven types of backhanded compliments. Here are two: “You look great for your age” uses a qualifier. “That’s a wonderful photograph; you must have an excellent camera” uses an external attribution. The post also lists five ways to respond. Here are two: Ignore the utterance or return with your own backhanded compliment. The question is: what happens next? Do these responses work?

But first, we should ask why the first person, the proposer, makes a backhanded compliment at all. The proposer’s intention is relevant input for the responder’s choice. Consulting.com notes that some backhanded compliments may be given due to negligence. They would, as it were, be honest mistakes. If we allow chance as a factor in human behavior, this might be so. If we deny this possibility, like psychoanalysts and other determinists do, we suspect that all backhanded compliments reflect some sort of nasty motivation, conscious or not. This is a strong and potentially dangerous assumption because it follows that any perceived offense is intended. The proposer has no way of denying the intent to insult.

Accepting the inference of intent, at least for the moment, how does one respond? Ignoring the insult is the wise choice. It may leave the proposer with a private sense of having scored a point, but one need not care about that. If there is an audience, it is not at all clear whether that audience would credit the proposer with superior intelligence or subtlety. Returning a backhanded compliment is clever, but it runs the risk of escalation. Here is an example:

Proposer: “Sometimes your memory still works very well.”

Responder: “A backhanded compliment. How nice that you still manage to make those.”

Proposer: “What is a backhanded compliment?”

Responder: [explains]

Proposer: “You are taking this too seriously, which is psychologically interesting.”

So you see, the result is a bit of ego jousting with no winner. Any attempt to load an utterance with a mine can be parried with the same. If both construe the exchange as one where the last word wins, any eventual victory is hollower the longer the exchange drags on. Hence the wisdom of ignoring the first salvo. Yet, one tactic to have the last word while denying having it is to assert “I am not even going to dignify that [with a response].”

Now we must return to the question of why the proposer steps into this hornet's nest in the first place. The proposer’s tactical interest is to preserve deniability while denying it to the responder. That is, the proposer can insist that the utterance was a pure compliment and that the responder is being defensive when challenging the utterance. In other words, the ideal outcome for the proposer is to make the backhanded compliment and then follow it up with a put-down diagnosis of the responder’s delicacy (Krueger, 2015). The backhanded compliment is a trap.

Besides ignoring it, refusing to dignify it, and returning the favor, the responder may ask for clarification: "What are you trying to say?” This parry forces the proposer to reveal their intentions or to backpedal. Backpedaling yields the advantage to the responder. Revealing the intention to insult at least levels the playing field by acknowledging the presence of a conflict. The proposer no longer gets something for nothing.

Not Flattery

As a type of insincere compliment, a backhanded one must be distinguished from a different type of insincere compliment, namely flattery. Whereas the backhander banks on the compliment’s insincerity being detected (therein lies the sadistic fun), the flatterer hopes that it is not. But flatterers worry too much. Even if the targets see through the compliments’ hollowness, their vanity accepts insincere praise (Chan & Sengupta, 2010).

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Not Just Condescension

Backhanded compliments are patronizing and condescending, but not every act of patronizing or condescension involves an insincere compliment. Condescension is a weak power move, and often involves overhelping (Gilbert & Silvera, 1996), lecturing, or -splaining. These tactics seek to extract gratitude or submission. Backhanded compliments may be given just for the joy of the sting.

Unsolicited Refusals to Apologize

If backhanded compliments contain an element of aggression, they raise questions about the necessity and adequacy of apologies. What might a person do after having given and received a backhanded compliment? The weakest form of an apology is the offer to 'take it back.' Taking it back amounts to a post-hoc simulation of reality that acknowledges a verbal misfiring without asking for forgiveness. By contrast, one form of indirect communication - like a backhanded compliment itself - is the proposer's unprompted assertion that there is nothing to be taken back. This is an ambivalent move because it claims that no backhandedness had occurred while simultaneously doubling down on it. A de-escalating move—which is available as an alternative—is to acknowledge the existence of contrasting perceptions and to suggest that the responder's perception is not the one intended by the proposer.

Emerging Literature

Backhanded compliments, it seems, are understudied. A working paper can be found on the internet at the time of this writing (Sezer et al., 2019), which reports studies showing that few backhanded compliments succeed in the way intended by the proposer.