Imagine if you heard your child's teacher say, ''Don't think so much of yourself.'' Imagine your spouse saying to you, ''You know, you're really not so good at what you do.'' We have developed a discourse of affirmation, and to deviate from that would be to enter another arena, linguistically and grammatically, so that what came out of our mouths would be impolite at best, unintelligible at worst.
—Lauren Slater, American psychologist, The New York Times Magazine, 2002