"I'm only being honest"

Two defences come up whenever someone is asked to stop shaming. One is honesty and the other is humour. Both protect something valuable, so both deserve care.

Take honesty first. Nobody wants to live among people who can't say a hard thing. If your colleague's report is full of errors, he needs to hear it. If your friend is drinking too much, a friend should say so. A book that told you to keep quiet about such things would be doing harm, and this one doesn't.

The test I'd apply is content. An honest statement contains information the other person can use. "There are three errors in the revenue figures on page four" is honest. So is "I've counted, and you've had a drink every night we've met this year, and I'm worried". Both are hard to hear. Both give the listener something to check and something to do.

Now compare "you're careless" and "you're turning into a drunk". They feel more honest, because they're blunter and took more nerve to say. But look at how much each one claims. "You're careless" asserts knowledge of a person's entire character on the strength of one report. You don't have that knowledge, and nobody does. Of the two statements about the report, the label is the less honest, because it goes well beyond what the speaker knows. It's an exaggeration, and it gets mistaken for candour because it's rude.

There's a further point, and it's an awkward one. When people say "I'm only being honest", the most honest sentence available is often about themselves, and it goes unsaid. "I was embarrassed in front of my boss." "I'm frightened about what your drinking will do to us." "I felt stupid when you corrected me at dinner." These are true and specific, and saying them would take real courage. The label is what we say so that we don't have to.

So shaming isn't honesty at a higher strength. You can turn honesty up as far as you like, with dates, figures and consequences, and never once say what kind of person the other is.

An example may help, since this is where people fear they'll lose their edge. A manager has an employee whose work has been poor for three months. The honest conversation is a hard one. "Four of your last six reports came back from the client with corrections. I've had to check everything you send, and that's a day a week of my time. If it continues, I'll have to start a formal process. I want to understand what's going on, and I want the next two reports to go out clean." Every sentence of that is uncomfortable, and none of it is a label. Adding "frankly, you're just not a details person" would make it less precise and no more truthful. It would also hand the employee something to argue with, and the argument would replace the conversation about the reports.

Now the joke.

Teasing is one of the pleasures of being close to people. Friends who've known each other thirty years insult each other constantly, and everyone at the table understands it as affection. Families have running jokes that would sound savage to an outsider. I've no wish to take any of that away. A household where nobody could be teased would be an airless place.

The difficulty is that a joke is also a convenient carrier for contempt, because it comes with a built-in denial. If the target objects, they're told they can't take a joke, which is a second shaming laid on top of the first. They're now humourless as well as whatever the joke said they were.

A few questions sort one kind from the other.

• Can they do it back? Teasing between equals runs both ways. If it only runs from parent to child, from boss to junior, or from the quick-witted partner to the slower one, it isn't play.
• Is the subject a sore one? Friends tease each other about things that don't hurt. A joke about someone's weight, their stammer, their failed business or their exam results is aimed at a bruise.
• Who's the audience? A joke made to the person is different from a joke made about them to the room.
• Do you stop when asked? This is the clearest test. If they say "I don't find that funny" and you stop, it was a joke. If you start arguing that it was funny, the laugh wasn't what you were after.

A note on children and sarcasm. Small children don't reliably understand irony. In studies, five-year-olds lag well behind older children at working out what a sarcastic speaker means. "Oh, brilliant, well done" over a broken plate gives a five-year-old praise in the words and contempt in the voice, and she can't put the two together. At best she's confused. At worst she gets the contempt and misses the joke. Either way she's learned nothing about the plate.

The face from chapter 6's list belongs here too, because it has the same built-in denial as the joke. The eye-roll and the sigh say "you're beneath me" without a word that could be quoted back. People who'd never call their partner stupid will roll their eyes at them in company. If you're checking your own habits, check your face as well as your sentences.