“Interesting”: The Word Critics Use When They Hate Something

I once showed a short story to a writer I admired, and after a long pause she said, "It's very interesting." My stomach dropped, and I understood in that moment that interesting is not a compliment. It's a holding pattern. It's the word people reach for when they need to say something, right now, and the true thing would be unkind.

What makes it so useful - and so devastating - is that it isn't a lie. The work probably is interesting, in the strict sense that it held the speaker's attention for a moment. So they haven't said anything false. They've just carefully declined to say anything good, and left you to notice the gap where the praise should have been.

Why "interesting" does the job

The genius of interesting is that it names a reaction without judging it. Good, beautiful, moving, brilliant - these are verdicts. They commit the speaker to an opinion. Interesting commits to nothing. It reports that something happened in the speaker's mind, without revealing whether what happened was pleasure, confusion, boredom, or alarm.

So it's the perfect escape hatch for the moment when someone is watching your face, waiting, and honesty would cost too much. It fills the silence. It sounds thoughtful. And it tells the listener, if they know how to hear it, exactly one thing: I have decided not to tell you what I think.

The rest of the field guide

Once you're listening for faint praise, you find a whole vocabulary of it - words that perform approval while withholding it. They're worth knowing, because they cluster around the same painful gap.

“Ambitious.” Applied to a finished work, this almost always means it reached for something and missed. It praises the attempt precisely because the result can't be praised. Nobody calls a masterpiece ambitious; they call it a masterpiece.

“Brave.” A cousin of ambitious. “What a brave choice” salutes your courage in doing the thing, which is a way of not commenting on whether the thing worked. Courage is being admired so that quality doesn't have to be.

“Different.” Or its formal cousin, unusual. It notes that the work is not like other works, which is true of a disaster as surely as a triumph. Different locates you outside the norm without saying which direction you went.

“I can tell you worked really hard on this.” The purest specimen. It praises the labor, which is visible, in order to avoid praising the outcome, which isn't good. Effort is the one thing that can always be honestly acknowledged, which is exactly why its acknowledgment is so ominous.

“It's not for me.” The kindest of the family, because it's the most honest about being an opinion. It declines to universalize - it says the failure might be in the match, not the work. But everyone hears the softer sentence underneath it.

The tell is always the same

What unites all of these is a single move: they praise something adjacent to the work instead of the work itself. The effort, the courage, the ambition, the novelty, the way it held attention for a moment - anything except the thing you actually wanted judged. When praise slides sideways onto a nearby quality, it's telling you the central quality couldn't bear the weight.

So the diagnostic question is simple. When someone responds to your work, ask yourself: are they praising the work, or something next to it? “This is beautiful” is about the work. “I can see how much this means to you” is about you. The distance between those two sentences is the whole message.

In defense of saying the true thing

I don't want to be too hard on faint praise, because I've handed it out as often as I've received it, and usually for a decent reason. Sometimes you genuinely can't say the hard thing - the moment is wrong, the person is fragile, the relationship matters more than the verdict. Interesting is sometimes a small mercy, and I'd rather live in a world with a few merciful evasions than one where everyone always says exactly what they think.

But I've also learned that the people who helped me most were the ones who refused the easy word. “This part doesn't work, and here's why” is worth a hundred interestings. Faint praise protects the feelings and abandons the work. Real criticism risks the feelings to save the work. And when you actually want to get better, the honest sentence - the one that costs the speaker something to say - is the only kind that ever helps.