The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [91]
This tactic is very effective for blunting sly digs (“Well, fancy meeting you here!” “No, fancy meeting you here!”) My favorite anti-compliment came from a woman who told me, “You look great! Isn’t this bar’s lighting wonderful. Soooo flattering.”
“Yes, it is,” I said (in my head, twenty-four hours later). “You look great!”
9. Killing kindness: Spleen feeds on outrage, so starve it: Stifle the abuser with niceness.
Recently I was at a house party, my first all-nighter in years. In the queue for the loo, a mad-eyed man glowered at me. So, in what I thought a cotton-candy, thoroughly amenable manner, I said something along the lines of “Gosh, it’s ages since I was at a house party like this, into the small hours. I feel like a teenager!”
“What do you mean?” he demanded.
“Well what I said,” I said. “Makes me feel young. Wonderful, isn’t it?”
“That is an incredibly arrogant stance,” he roared, and strode off.
Later I found myself next to him on the dance floor. He was chewing off a woman’s ear. I heard the words “superficial” and “desperate.”
“What’s up?” I asked sweetly.
“This, all this,” he cried. “It’s so fake!”
“Oh, that’s terrible. Why suffer? Don’t do it to yourself. Go home. Now.”
“You’re absolutely right.” He beamed, then asked me to join him.
10. Invert: Can you invert the jibe and find advantage in alleged weakness? An aging politician was attacked by a younger for his ripe years and sparse hairs. In reply, he promised not to exploit the advantage experience and wisdom gave him over the callow youth.
11. Prick the pompous: On the sharp end of a lecture? Dull it with a tease: “I’m afraid you can’t reform me.” A seventeenth-century lady of leisure ended a suitor’s diatribe on the conduct of Philip II by asking:
“Why, sir, will you be wise from morning to night?”
12. Ironic praise: So there he is, face like a psychotic tomato, spitting ire. Take a deep breath and try this trick used by advocates in Ancient Greece: Eulogize a minor and unrelated aspect of the assailant, which should highlight the gravity of his crime, or at least disconcert him. Say: “That color suits you”; “You have wonderful teeth”; “You haven’t aged a bit”; “Incredible tan. Gran Canaria?”; “Who told you you’re sexy when you’re livid?”
If he fulminates long and hard, emulate the Fat Man, Mr. Gut-man in The Maltese Falcon, who swats off Sam Spade/Humphrey Bogart’s cracks as if they were confetti. Say you admire a man who knows his own mind, remark how elegantly he slings his mud . . . or thank him: “It was considerate to let me know you had a problem, and in such detail.”
13. Escape the moment: Try an ominous question. Say: “I wonder how you’ll remember this conversation” or “Feel good now? Remember, feelings change.” This one, overheard by party-talk collector Andrew Barrow, should pull a ranter up short: “Know what I’m thinking? Good job you don’t, because it’s very rude.”
14. Mock the mocker: Conservative politician Ken Clarke once vaporized an opponent’s tirade by scoffing, “The Right Honorable Gentleman sounds like a shopping list.” (In their laughter, most MPs forgot the charge sheet.)
If someone is crude, you might venture: “I bet you can’t say that backwards,” “Now spell it,” “And words of more than one syllable?”, “I’d hate to meet you on a bad day,” or “This isn’t your first language?” Or offer “Another drink?”
15. Instruction: You might suggest, as Mr. Bennet does to his unmusical daughter Mary at the piano in Pride and Prejudice, that your assailant has delighted you long enough. So will he, kindly, shut it.
16. Take him on a journey (a stratagem for the strong): Play consequences, showing what his attitude will cost: flash a Clint Eastwood smile.
David Geffen, then a Warner Bros. exec, went up to Eastwood, after the studio screening of his new film The Outlaw Josey Wales. “I only want to suggest