Strange Conversations: Part One Hundred and Seventy
Posted 13 July 2009 in Strange Conversations by Catriona
The first conversation for the day, after a disturbed night:
NICK: Go back to bed, sweetie. You look like hell.
ME: Thank you.
NICK: I am trying to be supportive.
ME: For the record, there is no way to say “You look like hell” supportively.
Share your thoughts [8]
1
Wendy wrote at Jul 13, 09:33 pm
not even with the “sweetie”?
2
Catriona wrote at Jul 13, 09:48 pm
Even with the “sweetie,” I don’t think “You look like hell” is ever what I want to hear first thing in the morning!
3
Tim wrote at Jul 14, 01:11 am
> For the record, there is no way to say “You look like hell” supportively.
“You look like hell — hot and dangerous.”
4
Catriona wrote at Jul 14, 01:21 am
You’d clarify that as “supportively,” Tim? Rather than, say, “flirtatiously”?
Still, I can see the context:
HEROINE: Since we’re up to the “big action set-piece” part of the film, I am heading out to destroy the people who murdered my family. How do I look?
HERO (who is in some way incapacitated, or he’d just do it for her): You look like hell—hot and dangerous.
Yeah, I suppose that would count as supportive.
5
Tim wrote at Jul 14, 05:32 am
> You’d clarify that as “supportively,” Tim? Rather than, say, “flirtatiously”?
Sometimes it’s a fine line. :)
6
Catriona wrote at Jul 14, 05:52 am
And I say we need more flirtatious support (or “supportive flirting”? No, that sounds daft) in this cold world of ours, frankly!
7
Sam wrote at Jul 14, 08:43 am
I think really it depends on the context as to whether being told you look like hell is a good thing. For instance if I was about to go out and was told I looked like hell that would be pretty unkind. If I was sick and looked like hell to the point where I could get a day off work- woohoo.
8
Catriona wrote at Jul 14, 09:09 am
See, now, there I agree with you, Sam.
Last semester, I had a horrific cold, which hit hardest on the day when I had a lecture followed by three tutorials (first tute straight after the lecture, forty-minute break between the tutes). I was entirely wiped out by the last tutorial.
After the last tute, a student asked me for an extension by saying, “No offense, but last week I felt like you look now.”
I mentioned this to one of the course’s other tutors on the bus home that evening, and she was horrified.
But I feel that if I’m ill, I want to look as though I’m ill (in a slightly sexy, Victorian, consumptive-heroine kind of way, obviously).