'Backhanded Compliment' Can Make You Feel Bad

Backhanded compliment: a compliment that implies it is not really a compliment at all. “She paid me a backhanded compliment when she said my work was ‘surprisingly good.’"¹

Also, an ambiguous statement: one that can be taken as a compliment, but which might also be seen as an insult. “She told him that he looked much better than he usually did, which was a bit of a backhanded compliment.”²

“Since at least the late 1800’s, the term ‘backhanded’ has been used figuratively to mean ‘oblique in meaning; indirect, devious, equivocal, ambiguous, or sarcastic,’” according to The Idiom’s website.

Backhanded compliments aren't really compliments

A backhanded compliment catches you off guard. You think you are being complimented, but actually, you aren’t. The person giving the backhanded compliment might not mean to insult you. But you can still feel hurt.

A friend gave me a backhanded compliment after I had recovered from cancer treatment when she said, “You look so much better.”

I told her I didn’t realize that I had looked so bad. She said she didn’t mean it that way, but she had been really worried about my appearance – thin and pale – after I had lost about 20 pounds during chemotherapy before my first stem cell transplant.

(Pro tip: If you want to compliment a friend who has been through the wringer, you keep it simple and say, “You look great.”)

"Most improved" is not a compliment

“Most improved camper” is a back-handed compliment. When I went to sleep-away camp with my cousin, she got “best water skier” and I got “most improved.” This didn’t feel great. I earned this dubious distinction twice.

A boyfriend had dragged me (not literally of course) to a dude ranch in Colorado. He loved horseback riding. I had taken some lessons in New York, where I grew up and ridden on the bridle paths of Central Park. But that was long ago. Also, I had almost fallen off when a friend put me on a horse, on a beach in Oregon, one Fourth of July weekend. The horses got spooked by a loud sound and dashed off down the beach. I almost fell off. I had hoped it would be my last time.

The boyfriend knew the owners and really wanted to go. I relented. They gave me a gentle horse. I feared for my life as we filed one by one, on our horses, along a narrow path overlooking a canyon.

“Don’t worry,” somebody said, “He doesn’t want to fall down there any more than you do.”

At the end of the week, we had a rodeo. I rode around, slowly, in a circle. Everyone got an award. Mine was “most improved.” I was just happy to get out of there in one piece. I had to laugh at the backhanded compliment.

The intention was good, but the statement made me worry

Now, back to a blood cancer-related backhanded compliment. It wasn’t exactly a compliment, but it was a statement intended to make me feel good, which instead made me worry.

I was at extracorporeal photopheresis – or light therapy – the treatment that I get for my graft-versus-host disease of the skin. Before the procedure, my nurse sends out a blood sample to make sure my counts are high enough to do the procedure.³

“Your platelets are back to normal,” she said.

“I didn’t know that they were low,” I replied.

She said that they had been down around 99 but not to worry. It might have even been due to that particular sampling. Or it might have been just that day.

When I first started getting this procedure, more than two years ago, I would ask what my counts were. But I got nervous if they were low. I figured that if they went ahead with the procedure, the counts were OK. So it was better not to ask. On this particular day, I didn’t want to know that they had been low. But since they were back to normal, I decided to let it go. Backhanded compliment notwithstanding.