‘You abosolutely must listen to this song,’ My friend told me recently. ‘It’s amazing.’ It wasn’t.
So when my friend emailed me the next day, asking ‘How good is this song?!’ I wasn’t quite sure how to reply. See if we had been speaking face to face (or even on the phone, because my point is one of tone), I would have told her instantly, ‘not very’. But when I wrote this as an email reply it looked terribly curt. I was also afraid that she would think I was being sarcastically deadpan- adding to my ‘not very’ a because ‘it’s BETTER THAN GOOD!’ I certainly did not want her to think that. Imagine the deluge of mediocre songs she’d start recommending to me.
Other people’s recommendations are a minefield. Unlike my own, which are infallible.
unfashionablylost 