What is the best compliment you’ve ever received?
This time,though, I don’t want to hear “nice” compliments.
I want interesting ones. Things that you took as a compliment that others may not see as a compliment at all.
I have my example:
About five or six people so far have said to me:
“Whenever I see a carcass on the road, I think of you…”
I love hearing this from people. Don’t ask how it came to be that so many people have said this to me.
How 'bout you guys?
When my fiance first introduced me to some of his friends, once of them described me to him as “exotic.”
Being from Indiana, I got quite a kick out of that.
I was once told by a woman over the phone that I had the sexiest voice she’d ever heard.
I felt quite flattered, until two things occurred to me:
(1) She was trying to sell me double glazing at the time.
(2) I had the worst cold I’d ever had.
“I can’t believe I sired this crap!” – My Dad, after a quite exasperating Thanksgiving dinner.
My siblings and I took it as very essense of our family spirit.
Anymore, there’s nary a familial gathering where it isn’t uttered at least once!
I applied for a staff writing position at “People” a few years ago and, after looking over my clips, they said, “Your writing style is really not appropriate for ‘People’ magazine.”
I glowed for weeks.
in high school i worked at a pearl paint store, i was in the airbrush department, and a lady started asking all kinds of questions of me, i just answered her in polite orderly fashion as a good salesman ought to. she finished inquiring about airbrush guns and left with a good bye and finished with the remark, “…you have the unnerving patience of a billy goat.”
i still don’t understand what she meant, but i liked it 
I was told by a friend in college that I have a Victorian face. If she means that I’m pale, then, I guess I agree with that. But I think it had to do with my English/Irish features.
I was also told by someone that I have Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes. However, if they had said I had her ass, I wouldn’t have taken it so well. [Disclaimer: I’m not picking on her weight–I, too am of the plump variety.]
I said on the last thread, and it still holds true, and is at least somewhat off the beaten path: a gay man told me I kissed as well as a man. <glow, preen>
Back in grammar school – I went to a Catholic school – the Mother Superior walked by us in line. Suddenly, without warning or apparently any reason she turned to me and said:
“_______, You’re so smart you’re dumb!”
To this day I don’t understand it.Pretty dumb, I guess.
One of my friends told me I looked very foreign. Then she made it more specific by adding, “You look very European.” To this day I don’t have a clue why she told me that. I mean, at least she didn’t tell me I looked very American. I like my uniqueness, and that would just kill it.
I always liked trivia, and was told by a teacher I knew “Everything about nothing, and nothing about everything”
I was once told by my friends in high school that I reminded them of the corn that gets stuck in logs of shit sometimes. Don’t think I’d put that as a compliment, but it’s the funniest thing anyone’s ever called me.
Jman
I was once told I had aristocratic beauty…
No really. A friend once sent me an e-mail when I was a bit blue, telling me that she admired my strength, and she did not possess the guts and the power that I did to be independant at 18. It made me cry. (how’s that for strength?)
My friend Dan mentors these two high school kids. One day we took one of the kids out - to a museum or something, and then we took him on the carousel, and then somehow Dan had to go and I ended up playing video games with this 14-year-old kid in the local arcade. Let me just say that the last video game I’d played was Zaxxon on my old Coleco Vision sometime in the 1980’s.
The kid tended to be very quiet around me, he’d often just look at me and laugh, but anyway we played the game (Streetfighter?) and I won! I won every game. And after, Dan told me that the kid had asked him if I could hang out with them again sometime, because I was “pretty cool for a girl.”
Also been told I’m built like a brick shithouse, and then I had to make the person explain, using the Commodores song, because it didn’t sound like a compliment one bit.
And I received the “Golden Shovel Award” from my high school English teacher, who commented in one of my papers that I’d “said nothing, but you said it so well that I really can’t take points off.”
Said by one of my housekeeping clients: “Rilchiam doesn’t do anything half-ass!” (Her guest wondered why I was washing the floor by hand, instead of with a mop.)
Said by a friend’s kid who’d just had his first Mrs. Field’s cookie: “They were almost as good as yours!”
When I was in high school, my Honors English teacher wanted very much for me to take the English AP exam. She tried very hard to convince me that I should, but I didn’t think I would do very well on it. Finally, she basically said, “You WILL take it, and I will even pay the fee!”
So, I took it. Got a score of ‘4’, which basically meant that I could have, if I had gone straight to a four-year, by-passed the English requirements completely 
The fact that one of my teachers was more confident in my abilities than I was really touched me.
I’d say one of the biggest compliments I ever received was this year when I went back to my high school to see my friends from the class one year behind me graduate. I ran into my old philosophy teacher (incredibally brilliant man and wonderful teacher) who mentioned that he had been using my final exam essays as examples for the class.
As if that weren’t enough, he then mentioned how his students always want to know “what professor” wrote them!
I was pretty psyched about that.
During my Junior year of high school I was known for getting high scores on tests. My teacher told me never to tell my classmates that I never did my homework because I was the only one smart enought to get by without doing it.
My 10th grade English teacher gave me a certificate. The “Wake Up You’re Sleeping” award.
This is one my husband, LIONsob got from one of son’s friends while driving the friend, son and a few other teens to a church event one evening.
“Gee, your dad looks like a serial killer, only nicer”
When I had my head shaved, people used to come up to me and tell me I had a nice shaped head. It was a very odd compliment to hear.