Sentence examples for hardly a compliment from inspiring English sources

That's hardly a compliment.

In "Pluto Nash," which isn't nearly that bad a picture (though that's hardly a compliment), he's a suave nightclub impresario, too.

It is a backhanded compliment — indeed, hardly a compliment at all — but it is the truth that the opera's kaleidoscopic, expressionistic shifts were rendered so sensuously that I did not even perceive the music as atonal.

3. "Lifted from the first of E.L. James' wildly successful novels, which started as a form of 'Twilight' fan fiction, the movie plays strictly by the book -- which is hardly a compliment.

George W. Bush was described as "Wilsonian" after 9/11, but that was hardly meant as a compliment.

Guthrie hardly meant this as a compliment.

A back-handed compliment.

Someone pays us a compliment, we hardly pay attention to it, or we deflect it.

Though hardly publicity shy, he did not consider it a compliment when people called him a great marketer.

A musician can hardly pay a bigger compliment to a colleague.

Still, "every song he played had four or five notes that were like a complete revelation to me, that made me hear the music as if for the first time," Mr. Quasthoff said, "and this is always how it is with him". A musician can hardly pay a bigger compliment to a colleague.