Livingdeb writes about getting a condescending compliment from a fellow dancer of the Argentine tango - "Wow, you're actually good." (It's the "actually" in that sentence, along with the tone of voice I assume was used, that makes it.) She says: "...certain compliments come with the assumption that the person doing the judging is extremely knowledgeable and thus able to have very important and worthy judgments" and notes that this person wasn't that great a dancer himself. She does not report responding to this statement with "Well, so much for the validity of the 'it takes one to know one' theory."
This reminded me strongly of something I hadn't thought of in a while but that totally pissed me off at the time.
In high school, my psychiatrist was Dr Toad - who was an asshole and is not to be confused with my incredibly tall/dark/handsome and helpful psychologist Ed (who was quite worthy of more erotic transference than he got from me). One day, Dr Toad had his son Toad Jr, who was in medical school at the time, sit in on my session. (This now strikes me as borderline unethical, esp since neither my parents nor I said that it was OK for him to do so, but at the time, it just seemed like more of the typical bullshit.) So we go through our usual drill of Dr Toad asking me questions and me responding in a minimal way and at the end of the session, Toad Jr says, with every aspect of seriousness and even a kind of disturbing flirtatious manner, something like "You have a very good vocabulary." (Was I too blindlingly white for him to use the term "articulate"?) I called upon my inner catatonic and did not respond with "Fuck you, pendejo," though it seemed the obvious rejoinder to a comment on my language skills.
To say that I was unaccustomed to being spoken to in such a patronizing way would be a vast understatement.
By contrast, Ed would occasionally laugh at things I said. (When, after a couple of months of going to his office, I actually started to talk.) At the time, it was annoying to feel mocked, but I quickly realized that those ideas were completely ridiculous and I appreciated his respecting me enough to laugh rather than pretend to take the statements seriously. It was good to not be treated like a child in need of protection.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Well, Sal, you are certainly articulate, and you also have a great vocabulary. :) This reminds me, Rick has gained a reputation at work for "stating things eloquently". I laugh that he has to be eloquent (and clear in his language use) or I call him on it. As far as condescending compliments go... yeah I've gotten a few. One was actually delivered more as a sort of twisted put-down but was a compliment from my angle -- someone in school to me in that "mean girl" sort of way, are you going to go to Harvard or something? Eh, no, Stanford, as it turns out.
Post a Comment