| Tuesday, October 03, 2006 |
| On Being a "Nice Guy" Diplomat |
I remember talking to Kat about this one time about the notion of being "too forward" and just felt like sharing this little diplomat tool with yall. This is called the "I don't mean to be" grammatical rule. Real easy to use. If you have, for instance a real racist comment inside of you that you feel like you need to blurt out, all you have to do is to preface it by saying "I don't mean to be racist but (is this dog meat in the fried rice?)". Come on now. If you didn't mean to be racist, you wouldn't say the racist comment at all. Prefacing it with "i don't mean to be racist" essentially does the job of removing malicious intent. If it comes off as racist, it's because of ignorance and that's it. And there lies the beauty of the rule. It does the job of hiding your intent by publicly removing the most obvious reason of why you are saying what you are saying.
Or how about the ever popular (and i've used this too), "I don't mean to be too forward but do you want to have dinner with me on the weekend?". If anything, altho you might be explicitly saying that you don't want to be forward but regardless what you mean, the action itself is pretty forward but what the preface does is that it sugarcoats it so it's not so aggressive but moreso passive aggressive. This means, for many cases, the exact same thing as "Hey Baby let's kick it" except with half the shock value.
This tool can be used in two ways: To differentiate youself from what you're not or just to blatantly lie to cover up your true intentions like "I don't mean to be an ass (but i really do mean to be an ass)" (hopefully more of the first and less of the second cause if everyone does the second than no one will ever believe anybody trying to use the first... confused?). For the most part this tool is real effective in "Nice Guy Politics" cause nice guys are, generally speaking, careful about what they say to the point that they don't offend someone. Check out the varying degrees of niceity in just asking a girl out to the movies.
From plain straight up neanderthal: You Me Movies Tommorow Night Be There
To our explained approach: I don't mean to be too forward but would you be interested in catching a movie with me?
To superduper nice almost borderline "what is he asking?" approach: I was wondering and would like to know your thoughts on this, if at anytime in the next few weeks, you'd might do me the favour of accompanying me to watch a movie, but don't feel any pressure to say yes or no right now. Just think about it and mull it over and let me know when you have time.
while the explained approach lacks the length and thought put into the superduper nice approach, i think it'll probably score you more movies. sooner or later im going to need to write something of consequence. haha |
posted by DarrenGene @ 6:55 AM  |
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| 4 Comments: |
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i'd say movies are an easy grab cuz you can always center the interest on a particular movie rather than another underlying intent.
dinners are harder. "hey wanna hit up X? i hear their meals are really nice.." doesn't fly with the same casual flair. might as well say "hey, wanna do dinner sometime?" straight up and honest - girls like that! :P. might score you some more meals out too!
happy hunting, neanderthal! =P.
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or you can just conk them in the head with a mallet, get dressed up and take them to a super fancy restaurant and hope that she wakes up by the time the appetizers get there.
I here that works.. try it.. lemme know how it goes..
oh and bring money.. for the meal and bail.
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katz straight up approach seems pretty straight up. i think they understand what u saying when u say what she is saying.
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u're messed darren...post more GECKO pictures!
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i'd say movies are an easy grab cuz you can always center the interest on a particular movie rather than another underlying intent.
dinners are harder. "hey wanna hit up X? i hear their meals are really nice.." doesn't fly with the same casual flair. might as well say "hey, wanna do dinner sometime?" straight up and honest - girls like that! :P. might score you some more meals out too!
happy hunting, neanderthal! =P.