Fishing For A Compliment?

Fishing for a Compliment?

Kind words are like honey—sweet to the soul and healthy for the body.

Proverbs 16:24

A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor debuted as an old-style variety show before a live audience on July 6, 1974. The show is known for its traditional folk music and its tongue-in-cheek radio dramas. But many people seem to enjoy best Keillor’s storytelling segment, “News from Lake Wobegon.” There’s a good example printed in Keillor’s book We Are Still Married:

The town ball club was the Lake Wobegon Schroeders, so named because the starting nine were brothers, sons of E. J. Schroeder. E. J. was ticked if a boy hit a bad pitch. He’d spit and curse and rail at him. And if a son hit a homerun, E. J. would say, “Blind man coulda hit that one. Your gramma coulda put the wood on that one. If a guy couldn’t hit that one, there’d be something wrong with him, I’d say. Wind practically took that one out of here, didn’t even need to hit it much”—and lean over and spit. . . .

So his sons could never please him, and if they did, he forgot about it. Once, against Freeport, his oldest boy, Edwin Jim, Jr., turned and ran to the centerfield fence for a long long long fly ball and threw his glove forty feet in the air to snag the ball and caught the ball and glove and turned toward the dugout to see if his dad had seen it, and E. J. was on his feet clapping, but when he saw the boy look to him, he immediately pretended he was swatting mosquitoes. The batter was called out, the third out. Jim ran back to the bench and stood by his dad. E. J. sat chewing in silence and finally said, “I saw a man in Superior, Wisconsin, do that a long time ago but he did it at night and the ball was hit a lot harder.”^a

Some people, like poor E.J., pull back their compliments because they harbor an irrational fear of making someone feel better than he or she should. It’s a fear, of course, that eventually makes them very lonely. And, sadly, it’s a fear that even appears among couples. As Kin Hubbard says, “Some folks pay a compliment like they went down in their pocket for it.” Don’t let that happen in your relationship. Be as generous as you can with compliments—as long as they’re coming from a genuine heart.

There is no effect more disproportionate to its cause than the happiness bestowed by a small compliment.

—Robert Brault

^a 71