It's rude, qualifying a compliment.
(Don't you hate when people qualify a compliment with "for your age?" What other three other words deliver as much punch to the gut as "for your age?").
Ravel and Debussy labelled Satie early on as a precursor, and not entirely as a compliment – Ravel qualified this with the adjectives "brilliant and clumsy".
Even President Obama, at a dinner in Washington a couple of weeks ago, joked that Schwarzenegger would be starring in a new reality series, "I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!" Whenever I mentioned Schwarzenegger to the masochists who covet his job, they responded variously with sympathy, qualified praise and backhanded compliments.
But a number of significant Hollywood film-makers – including David Lynch, Steven Spielberg and Oliver Stone – have moved to the junior medium for mini-series or documentaries and now Steven Soderbergh has paid a compliment, if a slightly qualified one, to home entertainment.
Ms. Poukou is one of around a hundred such trained parents - called 'maître parents' - in the area, complimented by only seven fully qualified teachers that have been provided by the Government.
Clinton returned the compliment, saying that Sanders was barely qualified to be interviewed by the New York Daily News.
"We have qualified with one game left and it's a big compliment for the team," said the City manager.
"We _expect _a woman to downgrade, qualify, or reassign a compliment," she writes.
This may feel weird at first, but simply accept the compliment without qualifying it.
The compliments for the Yankees' new hitting coach, Gary Denbo, are routinely qualified, lest they be construed as criticism of the man he replaced, Chris Chambliss.
