‘To be Honest,’ is Not An Excuse to Be a Condescending Twat
I like learning. No, that’s a lie — I like taking on more information on my own terms. I admit that I don’t respond well to constructive criticism at the time of delivery, but after I get over my crippling rage, I do get the point, take it on board and improve.
Good feedback, for me, is communicated using small words, is succinct and offers me the opportunity to immediately improve.
Good feedback — I don’t feel like you described the forest in enough detail.
Bad feedback — The overall narrative needs to be reviewed, I can’t “see,” the forest and, as a result, don’t really get a sense from a location standpoint.
Piss off.
Also, putting the words, “frankly”, “don’t take this personally but…” or “to be honest” in front of feedback, doesn’t give you free license to be a dickhead.
I have never experienced a sentence that began with, “I’m not being rude,” and ended with anything other than brutal rudeness. Nobody ever said, “I’m not being rude, but I loved dinner.”
Putting stuff in front of sentences is a tool that manipulators have used since the beginning of time. I had a friend who would attempt to fictionalise real-life. Here’s how it would go –
“Let me tell you a story,” my friend would say. “It’s about a baker who used to live in France, and it was 1512, and there was disease and…”
Anyways, at the end of the story, he would raise his eyebrows and say, “Sound familiar?”
To which I respond, “no.”
Apparently, I was the baker and France was a metaphor for my house and…who cares…it was really annoying. The point is that this life was hard for bakers in 1512.
Another one of my favourite sentence beginners is the question — “can I be honest with you?”
It’s a great question because there is no way to wriggle out of it. If I respond to that question by saying, “no thanks, I’d rather you lied to me.” Then I am setting myself up for a very confusing conversation in which the other person will speak only in untruths. On the other hand, if I say, “yes please I would love you to be honest with me,” then I will end up with a conversation that ends in me burying a corpse in a shallow grave near this river I saw last week.
The most brutal sentence starter is, “to be honest…” It gives a false sense of freedom to the person giving advice. After all, who doesn’t like honesty? Do you want me to lie? No? Good, then, to be honest, you do nothing but make bad decisions, and smell like the inside of my microwave.
You’re welcome.
People shouldn’t be allowed to put anything but facts at the beginning of a sentence. Replace “to be honest,” with
“I’m about to say something horrible,” and, “frankly,” with, “I’m about to say something horrible, in a concise fashion.”
That way, nobody needs to get hurt emotionally or buried near a very picturesque river.
