Mediocre former students and coworkers asking you for letters of reference; children accustomed to getting high-fives and stickers just for showing up; performers fishing for compliments on their less than stellar performance; the doctor with a hideous bedside manner who did your lifesaving surgery; that overeager blind date who thought you’d made a Love Connection. You’ve met ’em. There are times in all of our lives when we’re called upon to pass judgement that’s expected to be complimentary (if not worshipful) and what we truly want to say is, well, the truth.

So I’m thinking one needs a handy resource, a nice innocuous sounding collection of pseudo-affirmative responses that allows for not clamming up in refusal to respond when asked the fateful question–but without having to resort to full disclosure. Sense that you’re about to be hit up? Whip out that magic list and take your pick of pretend-affirmations and you’re home free. You can smile sweetly, pronounce your kindly evasion, and skate off smoothly before anyone knows what’s hit him. Life should be so sanitary.

Cruel to be kind? Or just to get away with something?

How could I go about this, I wonder. Let’s see, we could start with the easy answer-with-a-non-answer method, you know, the one where you go backstage and forestall the request for details with “I’ve never heard anything like that before!”, which if said with a gleaming flash of every tooth in your head in the credible imitation of an awestruck smile has a certain impenetrable nearness to a compliment. The cool thing with this one is, should guilt try to sneak in on your conscience, you can remind yourself that you are truly in awe (as long as you, hopefully, are never called upon to say of what). While I’m mentioning credibility, there’s that classic “critique” where all you say with that glorious grin is “Incredible!”–scrupulously true without your having to commit aloud to what lacked credibility.

But really, shouldn’t there be an opportunity here for a few style points? I must cogitate upon it. Feel free to chip in to the cause if you have some outstanding face-savers for such occasions.

“Gentlemen, I cannot recommend this student highly enough to your program.” Really, I can’t.

“Her performance in my class was absolutely unique in my twenty years of teaching experience.” I’ve never had anyone else stay so well below the bottom possible marks so much of the time.

“I’ve never worked with anyone else that operated the office microwave so flawlessly.” The complete sleight-of-hand or misdirect is probably the only safe route when there is no possible positive performance-related thing to be said about the person in question. On that note, I do know that it’s at least as much about what’s unsaid as what’s said that makes any of these interchanges work.

For example, “I’ve been on pins and needles for ages waiting for the opportunity to tell someone what an amazing person she is and how worthy of your hiring!” Why muddy that up with the purely optional clarification that you’ve been dying for the opportunity to offload this human piece of debris on some other unwary employer? Or the fateful replacement of “how” with “not”, which, while equally true, would only be likely to cloud the issue, n’est-ce pas?

Children generally have frighteningly sensitive crap-o-meters, so one does have to tread carefully when asked for upbeat commentary by a kid. Perhaps one can evade the issue with bold diversionary tactics, particularly those involving a high sugar content or permission to play video games obsessively for an hour. If that’s not feasible, it’s best to find some way to put a positive spin on a bit of the act or art in question, no matter how miniscule the opening offered. “Honey, that is unquestionably the hugest green thing I have ever seen you draw. And without a crayon, too!” On this occasion, it’s probably a good idea to make sure you get the rest of the artistic medium blown out of the young artist’s left nostril while offering the affirmation, so as not to have the artwork become part of an ongoing series.

With older artists, one might be safer heading off the complimentary fishing expedition with the introduction of a competing topic the artist can love, such as his distinctive artistic process. It’s probably not polite, unless you and present-company are pretty darn familiar with each other (and then I’d just ask why prevarication is required anyway) what he was smoking, or whether he feels his current meds influence his work significantly. “How do you come up with your ideas?” has been done to death, but maybe a good twist on it can work. Let’s see: “Do you find that visual or tactile influences play a larger role in your practice?” By avoiding the obvious sensory connections yet remaining in a satisfyingly subjective realm, you open the door for all kinds of rambling through the meadows of self-examination and evaluation. You could be out of danger by now.

But wait! Here comes Dr. Beastly to collect your fawning kudos on his stellar work despite his having browbeat you within an inch of your life through the entire process leading up to your surgery and then proceeded to terrorize both you and your caregivers right through the recovery room and into the exiting wheelchair. I realize that in this instance there is an almost overwhelming temptation to save your savagery for his bank account, considering that it’s yet one more area in which he abused you highly, or perhaps to just let fly on the spot with a fusillade of foreign terms best used for different kinds of bodily reference. But in your heart (which he might have just helped fix) you know that there’s a slight chance you might have to call on him for further tuneups. So if a simple “I appreciate your not having killed me” won’t do, perhaps you could try “I will make sure everyone I know hears about what you’ve done here.” For me, to me, whatever. They will be hearing all about you!

Very few are the happy folk that have never suffered through a blind date or one that made them wish they were blind, deaf, and completely insensate. The worst are the sort of dates where it’s clear at the end of the expedition that the person you’re with had such a different view of the occasion that you are fairly certain you were in separate dimensions at the time. How to let Desmond Delusional down gently–while still assuring that he understands the finality of this transaction? Delusions do die hard, you know. Being too nice leaves room for persistence. Feigning one’s own death has often proven awkward in its complications.

Sometimes the occasion calls for more than just pretending to be angelic . . .

I tend to prefer actual tact in this instance, because I am beyond certain that I was the not-so-dreamy date in question at least somewhere along the line in my dating career. Odds on it. So when I came up against an over-enthusiastic would-be suitor myself,  I chose to find wriggle room for second date escaping in as realistic a way as possible each time. I didn’t date much altogether, unsurprisingly–but I congratulate myself that it was because I had a pretty good idea of what I was and wasn’t looking for in a date and didn’t care to settle: when the right guy appeared on my doorstep I got right in gear and bulldozed on into his life. I’d tell you to ask him how to fend off unwanted advances from a lunatic lover, but he’s clearly not the guy for the job, since he married me.

Sometimes it’s nice to actually be nice. Just in case.

What, you think just because I spend inordinate time hunting for ways to get away with saying unsavory things to unsuspecting people, I’m not just a sweetie underneath the hard crust?