My mother always suggested that if we couldn’t think of anything nice to say the phrase “that’s very interesting” would fill the conversational gap.
As Camilla Cavendish (“It would be so much easier if we said what we thought”, Opinion, FT Weekend, FT.com, April 19) so enjoyably explained in her piece on the “polite-isms” that Britons deploy to conceal annoyance — and non-Brits can find so hard to interpret — this can cause considerable confusion in formal situations, sounding complimentary yet signalling anything from total incomprehension to murderous levels of disagreement.
Best avoided. Yet so tempting.
Charlotte Phillips
London KT1, UK
