One of the marks of a true Southerner when I was growing up was a rather elaborate structure of common courtesy. It went far beyond “please” and “thank you.” It was a complex system that we absorbed as we grew up so that we could, with a straight face, actually say, “May I have the honor of this dance?” I think I actually said that a few times.

It’s only taken me something over 31,000 days to realize that, if removed from the post-Victorian rulebook that we followed, a lot of our responses to a compliment bordered on discourtesy or were just plain rude. But we didn’t take them literally; we just accepted them as a part of our culture, much of which didn’t make a lot of sense anyway.

 Below are some of our more common compliments, the prescribed response, and the way someone just dropped on Planet Earth might interpret them. A lot of them had to do with appearance before it became a workplace sin to tell a woman she looked particularly nice on a given day. However, they were also used on a host of occasions with equal frequency.

 For instance:

The compliment: That dress looks absolutely beautiful on you.
The response: You mean this old thing. I must have had it forever.
Literal translation: Do you have no taste at all?

The compliment: I love your hairdo.
The response: Really? Some days I just can’t do a thing with it.
Literal translation: Do you have no taste, or have you gone blind?

The compliment: Your house is so lovely.
The response: I’ve just been so busy that I can’t keep up.
Literal translation: If you were a better housekeeper, you’d recognize that it’s short of perfection.

 The compliment: This cake is delicious.
The response: It’s just something I threw together when I heard you were coming.
Literal translation: I thought your taste was all in your mouth, but you don’t have any there either.

 As noted, this routine creeps into other areas, too. For instance, as a saxophone player and occasional soloist, I have been told (even more occasionally) that I played something particularly well. Leaving aside the fact that the saxophone is the third most slandered instrument still played (behind the accordion and the banjo) and that there may be more saxophone jokes than blonde jokes (What do you call ten thousand saxophones in the bottom of the ocean? A good start.), my own assessment of my musical talents (backed by the Head of the Music Department at Western Carolina College) makes me leery of any compliment about my playing, which led to exchanges such as this one:

 The compliment: You played that beautifully.
The response: I made a hash out of bar 30, and I doubt the guy who wrote it would have recognized the coda, and the cadenza didn’t cadenze. Literal translation: Cochlear implants may be the answer for you.

 I understand the reasoning behind such responses. We, like Death, should be not proud. Almost like the Jewish custom of warding off evil spirits by brushing aside compliments, we feel that we should repay any person offering a compliment with a bit of self-deprecation, spotlighting the modesty we’re so proud of. However, I believe it does a disservice to people who are being sincere or nearly sincere in what they say.

 I discovered not too long ago the solution to this whole thing. It required that I shuck what I had always held to be an essential part of the culture I grew up in, but I found it freeing. (And all the self-help books say freeing is a good thing.)

 I was playing with a small chamber group, and after a concert, one of the auditors (concerts have auditors, and spectacles have spectators) said, “I really enjoyed the concert. You played beautifully.” I rapidly sifted through fifteen or twenty self-deprecating responses in my head, many of them true, and attempted to select the one that my grandmother would have most approved of. However, that was just too much mental activity for an old man.

So I just said, “Thank you.” And we went  our separate ways.