Kristin Scott Thomas is fed up of having to say thank you when someone says she’s still got it. And there are plenty of other comments that are apt to backfire

Chris Matthews, one of the US’s best known news anchors, has summarily quit his job at MSNBC following complaints about his reported remarks to a female guest. They are quite something, when you see them all written down. “Why haven’t I fallen in love with you yet?”, the journalist Laura Bassett says he asked her in the makeup room. She wrote in GQ: “When I laughed nervously and said nothing, he followed up to the makeup artist. ‘Keep putting makeup on her, I’ll fall in love with her.’”

What is wrong with this “compliment”? It’s in the classic negging style, the quick one-two: one, clearly you are highly desirable, otherwise why would a man such as myself expect to have fallen for you? Two, there is room for improvement, quick, put some more makeup on, then my animal urges might overcome me. Negging objectification is the worst kind, containing that catastrophic hubris, “You, lady, will be so thrilled by my partial desire that you’ll be instantly looking for tips on how to increase it.”

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Any blanket objectification that suggests you are being bagged up by the pound for desirability – comments on your walk, your arse or indeed any particular body part, even “you have lovely eyes” – is a bit unnerving. This is the Kylie Minogue test: at the height of her fame, people talked about Minogue’s butt as though it were a separate entity that could attend functions and make headlines independent of the rest of her. And that may have sounded like a compliment to a playful media class, but quiddity is identity. It’s dehumanising when people talk about you as if you’re Lego and can be disaggregated into components.

Comparative compliments – you have lost weight, you look better/fitter/even more beautiful than ever – suggest to the recipient that she is on a constant appraisal, though God knows it’s not mutual, since she could never turn around and say: “Thanks, you are carrying around a little more weight, though only around your jowls.”

Overly carnal phrases – you look delicious/good enough to eat – are too much, unless you have a lot of shared history, which here I am using as a euphemism for “have shagged”.

Finally, any suggestion of surprise, particularly around age – “you look great for 55” – is in neg territory. This week, Kristin Scott Thomas told Radio Times: “I’m fed up of having to say ‘thank you’ when someone says I’ve still got it.” The correct compliment for Scott Thomas, by the way, is to fall on your knees and say: “You are everything.” Because she is everything.