When I was in high school, rarely was an insult worse than calling someone “fake.”

“Gosh, I love your shoes,” a girl might say, sitting next to you in chemistry, simultaneously giving you a side-eye that communicated much more convincingly that she did not, actually, love your shoes at all. In fact, the way she’d said she loved your shoes caused you to give them a closer look to figure out what was wrong with them.

It was something about the way the words didn’t match the eyes that did it, that made the words less than hollow. It transformed them. The chasm between truth and assertion not only neutered the compliment but changed it into an insult.

“Ugh, she’s so fake,” you might tell your friend at lunch.

But I’ve been seeing more of this general fakery lately — dishonest compliments,

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