Bottom Line It For Me

This business is well ended.
My liege, and madam, to expostulate
What majesty should be, what duty is,
Why day is day, night night, and time is time,
Were nothing but to waste night, day and time.
Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief: your noble son is mad:
Mad call I it; for, to define true madness,
What is it but to be nothing else but mad?
But let that go.

Intelligent speech and writing should aim at using few words. This proverb comes from the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare. This beautiful bit of doggerel is uttered from Lord Polonius. He's a bottom-line-it kind of guy. He doesn't pussyfoot around when telling the queen that her noble son Hamlet is in serious needs of some meds. He's seeing dead people and imagining all sorts of intrigues. And he dispatched that hot girl Ophelia off to a nunnery. He obviously needs some help. No one is willing to address the issue so it falls to Polonius to lay it out.

This opens the broader topic of those intriguing people who bottom line it. Love them or hate them--you always know where you stand. Sometimes you get a little bitchslap as a bonus even though the bottom-liner doesn't usually intend to be hurtful. They say the truth hurts.

Several of my friends are bottom-liners and perhaps that's why I value them so. I do like people who tell it like it is, even if it stings a little in the delivery. My mother's family were and are consummate bottom-liners. They are English and it is characteristic of the English to dole out a compliment in tandem with a dig. Example: my grandmother, whom I adored, would hug me when we'd meet. She'd say, "Oh, what a lovely hug, ducks!" and then she'd smack my bottom and say, "And what a great big bot you got there, ducks." You always knew where you stood.

You come to collect the particularly good ones over the years. I have far too many to recount here, because it's late and I'm tired but a sampling will illustrate the bottom-line-barb combination I'm attempting to explain:

-On a sales call with my boss waiting for an important to arrive. She says, "Oh, you put a little blonde in your hair no? Did you mean for it to turn out so brassy?"

-Arriving at a formal event after I had a dress disaster getting ready. I had to substitute a cocktail dress pulled from the closet at the 12th hour for the gown I planned to wear. The Glamazon sees me and says, "Your hair looks great! Shame the dress is so awful."

-At work, Mamela sees me and notes a new cashmere sweater I'm wearing. "Oh, I love that sweater! From Banana Republic, right? It's a good color for you. It does nothing for your boobs and figure."

And so on. You get the point.

While I appreciate the bottom liners, I also appreciate a little cushioning on the back end. Even Lord Polnius closes his lines with a 16th century version of "But it's cool." That makes him my kind of guy in an Elizabethan kind of way.