You think of the skinny misery-goats you've known (heck, I used to be one of them!), then you think of the dreadful marriages you made when slender and how you started getting fatter when you fled them and finally you think: "Praise divorce and pass the panna cotta – it's not calories, it's insurance!" But even I am not endlessly smug.
"In the effort to help children feel good about themselves, parents will praise more than is appropriate," said Fretta Reitzes, director of the Goldman Center for Youth and Family at the 92nd Street Y.M.-Y.W.H.A., who thinks praise caught on partly because working mothers want their time with their children "to be full of smiles and hugs," she said.
Think pieces praising the owner were written faster than the average person could read them, talking heads glowed at the league's "bold stance for racial justice".
I support it because I am one of those people who I fear were rather glibly derided by the noble Lord, Lord Dear, as being part of a tiny minority and, I think, were praised by my noble friend Lady Knight as being delightful, in that I am gay.
I don't think I praised enough the anchoring performance of Jacob Roa as Liam, the hero of the piece that all the other characters revolve around.
Like the ostrich, she defied description: her career made mincemeat of the critics, usually men, who thought they were praising her.
Ulmer may have thought he was praising Jews (for the record, I'm a member of the tribe) by honoring what's widely believed to be an uncanny ability to become rich enough to give their kids $100,000 Bar Mitzvahs, complete with champagne fountains, American Bandstand dancers and major-league baseball stars.
That could certainly be read as a backhanded compliment: it is impossible to imagine that anyone would have thought to praise President Clinton, for example, for stringing a couple of thoughts together in the absence of Ms. Rice's predecessor, Sandy Berger.
When Jerry Glanville coached the Falcons, he so loved one linebacker's attitude that he thought to praise the young man.
On March 24th, Labour's housing guru, Andrew Adonis, published a report for IPPR, a think-tank, praising this model for regenerating estates, calling them potential "city villages".
