Quietly killing us with compliments

Kind words don’t always convey the best intentions.

Photo by Aron on Unsplash

She looks sixteen, but she’s a professor. That’s what the dean said about my friend when introducing her at a faculty orientation. The look on her face told me everything. Sure, she laughed. But you could practically taste the back of that dean’s hand. Never mind that she’d published a novel with a major New York…