See left-handed compliment in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
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"ref": "1921, E. Phillips Oppenheim, chapter 16, in Nobody's Man:",
"text": "\"We have sat through the whole of dinner and not once mentioned politics.\"\n\"You made us forget them,\" Tallente murmured.\n\"A left-handed compliment,\" Jane laughed.",
"type": "quote"
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{
"ref": "1964 October 30, “The Morning After”, in Time, retrieved 2013-10-07:",
"text": "In a somewhat left-handed compliment, UN Secretary-General U Thant described Russia's new bosses as \"competent and unpretentious.\"",
"type": "quote"
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"ref": "2006 March 19, David Orr, “On Poetry: Samuel Menashe—New and Selected Poems”, in New York Times, retrieved 2013-10-07:",
"text": "[C]alling someone a \"neglected master\" makes for one hell of a left-handed compliment.",
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"A complimentary remark which is ambiguous or ineptly worded, so that it may be interpreted as having an unflattering or dismissive sense."
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"(idiomatic) A complimentary remark which is ambiguous or ineptly worded, so that it may be interpreted as having an unflattering or dismissive sense."
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"ref": "1921, E. Phillips Oppenheim, chapter 16, in Nobody's Man:",
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"ref": "1964 October 30, “The Morning After”, in Time, retrieved 2013-10-07:",
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{
"ref": "2006 March 19, David Orr, “On Poetry: Samuel Menashe—New and Selected Poems”, in New York Times, retrieved 2013-10-07:",
"text": "[C]alling someone a \"neglected master\" makes for one hell of a left-handed compliment.",
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Download raw JSONL data for left-handed compliment meaning in English (2.3kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-12-03 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-11-21 using wiktextract (94ba7e1 and 5dea2a6). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.