In the past I’ve sometimes got it wrong, the compliment. Too earnest, too fast, out of nowhere like a soft little sniper. Or chucked from a distance, or too familiar, or too specific. Even the worst compliments, though, I have always maintained, are good, as long as they are genuine and well-meant (and as long as they don’t comment, of course, on the size of a body – a criminal sin in my eyes). Recently, especially when the sun is out, I have found compliments towards strangers forming on my tongue, but the part of me that wants to put off becoming a batty older lady of the kind that camply bothers well-dressed commuters forced me to swallow them.
It was in this state of repressed admiration that I read two things. The first was a comment by Barbra Streisand, underneath an Instagram post that showed Melissa McCarthy walking glamorously with a mutual friend. She wrote, “Give him my regards did you take Ozempic?” I laughed, of course I did. It reminded me of one of my favourite social media accounts, OldPeopleWeb, which collates the comments, photos and general misfires of older people attempting to use the internet. For example, “Congrats on your sobriety Denise but you look dreadful in both pictures all my love Maureen x.” In response to the online uproar that followed, Streisand clarified, “She looked fantastic! I just wanted to pay her a compliment.” Someone should send her the second thing I read, a Time magazine piece about how to give good compliments. Except halfway through, I started to feel like we were all missing something.
