Scoville: Yeah, *real* compliments are communicated to someone else. Hence the tradition of tradelasts (does anybody do them any more?).

About 1968 I was visiting some friends in Kingston, NY, and went out to buy the Sunday paper. I was walking down a street of houses that were about to be torn down for urban renewal, and on the front steps of one of them were sitting two small boys & a dog. The dog ran out & started yapping at me, and one of the boys yelled at the dog & got up to fetch him in, but the other one said "It's O.K., he's not scared". I am in the vile habit of discounting compliments, but I couldn't do anything to that one.