What Abraham Lincoln Didn't Say About Politeness

A few years ago I worked out an alternative perspective on what terms like "politeness" and "courtesy" really mean. (It was an arduous dig because getting to bedrock re: human intentions requires the worst sort of impoliteness; it involves bluntly pointing out what's actually going on rather than smoothly, frictionlessly going along with the cover story. You must be obscenely impolite to grasp what politeness actually is.)

The gist came to this: "Politeness is in the pretending."

Well, it looks like Abraham Lincoln got there first:

"Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves."

Whoops. Not Abraham Lincoln after all. It seems like fewer than half the quote attributions on the Internet are correct. I've started to double-check before passing them on, and caught this one right in the nick of time.

Playing along is everything. I'm unusually benign in intention, but my disinclination to "play along" makes me an absolute monster.

Strangely, it never seems to work the other way. I've never found anyone the least bit willing to go along with (or even begin to try to determine) my own self-image and self-drama. This reminds me of the fact that a great many people have told me what offends them, expecting me to adjust accordingly, yet no one's ever inquired as to what offends me. Nor cared much when informed.

Without incoming examples, I never learned to adjust behavior. My preferences seldom coddled, I assumed this to be a laissez-faire world. I obliviously missed the groundrule: solicitous care and pandering are demanded, not offered.


When I was a child, there was considerable pressure put on me to write letters to my grandparents, who I didn't know well, and who never once wrote back. It took decades for me to realize that my sense of discomfort and imbalance was perfectly understandable. Decades!