Praising with Faint Damnation

This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew.

A friend and I were discussing a route for a bike ride. I was pretty tired and unmotivated so I said sure but let’s do a really easy ride. I suggested taking Bay Bridge bike path from Berkeley (California) to Treasure Island. My friend had never done that, and said “is that pretty nice?” I replied “No it’s not nice at all…it’s probably the least-pleasant ride I do with any regularity.”

One might think “jeez, why would you want to do that ride, then? But consider: _something_ has to be “the worst ride I do with some regularity.” I do this one every couple of months, when I want a change from my usual rides and when I don’t want to exert myself too hard. If it really sucked I wouldn’t do it at all! It’s sort of the opposite of “damning with faint praise”: I’m praising with faint damnation.

This is peripherally related to the Reebok Principle, which came up here about eighteen months ago in a post that I think is worth re-visiting because of its comment section, which went off into pandemic-related stuff a bit and provides an interesting reminder of what people were thinking at that point.

This post is by Phil.

3 thoughts on “Praising with Faint Damnation

  1. I had a discussion about this (and specifically the idea of “praising with faint damnation”, called such) a few months ago! The context was me writing a Letter of Reference and considering ways to circumvent standards of unbridled praise (eg as touched upon here https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/09/23/hey-whats-up-with-that-method-from-1998-that-was-going-to-cure-cancer-in-2-years/). Committees *expect* unbridled praise, and I legitimately had nothing but positive things to say about this person, and really wanted them to get the thing I was recommending them for. So I considered introducing a bit of “faint damnation” to signal that, no, I wasn’t just hiding away all the bad things about them, as traditionally customary… rather, I’ve wracked my brain really to come up with reasons why not to give them the thing, and the best I was able to come up with was this very trivial attribute (I think I even considered inverting the classic penmanship line — “sometimes their handwriting can be slightly difficult to read!”).

    Ultimately I decided against it, as I worried that any deviation from expectation to be too risky. But I have used it before, in e.g. eulogies and (wedding and other) toasts, and as a general counter-signaling playful teasing sort of thing among friends.

    Incidentally, Wikipedia writes: “The inversion “praising with faint damns” is a more modern coinage,[7] though it certainly goes as far back as 1888.[8]” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damning_with_faint_praise) but I don’t have time rn to track down the latter reference. Maybe someone else can track its roots!

  2. This is just a specific instance of a general principle called scalar implicature, which I’ve brought up on the blog in the past. Perhaps not surprisingly for an academic, one of the examples Grice gives in his seminal paper introducing several maxims of cooperative communication is of an academic reference letter where the strongest praise was that the candidate had excellent penmanship. The scalar implicature is that if this is the best thing you can say about someone, they must not be very qualified.

  3. “scalar implicature”

    This is how everything should be read – especially in news, politics and science. (It should be noted, however, that scalar implicature depends on the assumption that the speaker is bound by truth, which is not always a good assumption in any of these fields).

    I like this bit:

    “This is commonly seen in the use of ‘some’ to suggest the meaning ‘not all’, even though ‘some’ is logically consistent with ‘all’.[2] If Bill says ‘I have some of my money in cash’, this utterance suggests to a hearer (though the sentence uttered does not logically imply it) that Bill does not have all his money in cash.”

    The modern news formulation “some say” (used heavily by NPR) has a somewhat different deployment for “some”, as used in this fictitious example:

    “however, some are now saying that inflation is a *good* thing because wages are also rising”.

    Here “some” is used to obscure both the social and numerical significance of beliefs or ideas. NPR doesn’t want you to know who says it or how widely it’s being said.

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