A backhanded compliment is a remark dressed up as praise that actually carries a sting. It might tell someone they look good “for their age”, or that a piece of work is impressive “considering how little time you had”, where the qualifier undoes the flattery that came before it. The phrase is used to describe both deliberate digs disguised as kindness and clumsy remarks that land badly despite good intentions. Either way, the listener is left unsure whether to say thank you or take offence, which is exactly the discomfort the phrase captures.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘a backhanded compliment’?
The idea behind the phrase is older than the wording itself. The variant “left-handed compliment” is the earlier of the two forms, and it draws on a long tradition of treating the left hand as the suspect, dishonest one, set against the trustworthy right. Etymonline dates this figurative “underhanded” sense of “left-handed” to the early seventeenth century, and records the compound “left-handed compliment” itself from 1787. Both come well before a separate and unrelated use of the word in nineteenth-century boxing slang, recorded from 1855, for a punch thrown with the left fist. The two senses are easily confused but developed independently.
“Backhanded” carried a similar figurative charge from around the same period. Wiktionary notes that similar underhand or deceptive uses of “backhanded” itself are attested from at least the early nineteenth century, well before the specific compound “backhanded compliment” became established. As a literary example of the compliment idiom in use, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s 1914 novel Tarzan of the Apes has been cited as an early instance of the phrase in print.
There is some disagreement over exactly when the wording settled into its modern form. Grammarist, tracing the “left-handed” version, places its first clear English record only broadly in the early twentieth century, some way after Etymonline’s 1787 date for the compound and later still than the early-seventeenth-century figurative sense of “left-handed” that lies behind it. What is consistent across the accounts is the underlying logic: both “left-handed” and “backhanded” trace back to old associations between the non-dominant, awkward side of the body and insincerity or deceit, which is why a compliment delivered with either hand comes with a hidden edge.