Complimentary?

[mrissa]

I've been thinking about compliments (thanks to conversations with tanaise and The Other Mark), so now I'm wondering: what do you like in a compliment? What kind of compliments are easiest for you to accept? What kind are hardest? Or are you good at taking compliments? What kind of compliments do you give, and do they tend to be received well by the people around you?

I mean this both topically (do you have an easier time with compliments to you personally or to something specific you did? with appearance, intellectual stuff, musical stuff, etc.?) and stylistically (how do you do with superlatives, comparatives, understatement, etc.?). And anything else you can think of, I guess.

If you use this to fish for compliments, for heaven's sake make them amuse me.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't mean to belittle the effects of depression, and you would certainly know better than I whether that's what's doing it for you. But enough people have expressed difficulty taking compliments that I'm not sure it's only that. For example, our culture may not be good at preparing people to take compliments, or geeks may be primed not to get a lot of them, or something. I'm not sure.

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

It might be the preaching against "pride" and such; our culture is big on Puritan ethics of avoiding taking any pleasure in anything, so surely our own abilities and qualities would be included. Yet another thing I can blame on the religious right! :-)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm...but aet and yhlee are reporting similar problems, and I would describe neither Estonian nor Korean culture as Puritan (or even really puritan).

On the other hand, it might be a case of divergent causes and convergent effects.