8 Common Phrases That Secretly Reveal Poor Social Skills—Do You Use Them?
7) “I’m not trying to be rude, but…”
This phrase might seem harmless, but it rarely leads to anything positive. More often than not, it’s a setup for something blunt, critical, or unnecessarily harsh.
I used to think prefacing a statement this way softened the impact. That as long as I acknowledged I wasn’t trying to be rude, the other person would take my words less personally.
But I learned the hard way that it doesn’t work like that. Instead of making criticism easier to hear, it just made people brace for something negative. Worse, it made me sound like I knew my words might hurt—but I was saying them anyway.
