GFMorris.com

I’m a big believer in the following axiom: “If you have to tell someone about one of your qualities as a person, the chances are that you’re lying.”

I believe in that axiom both from observational and personal experience. Case in point: when I went off to school at MSMS, I took the horribly audacious step of posting my ACT score on the wall above my desk in my dorm room. I wanted everyone to see what a smart person I was!!!

Looking back, I can examine my motives: I was entering a highly competitive academic environment, and while I never had any presumption that I’d be the smartest person there, I wanted to be up at the top. That posting was a warning shot across everyone’s bow.

It was also, in two words, incredibly stupid.

I think we see cases of this all the time: people claiming to be lovable when they’re really pretty prickly; people who state their hotness, when their mama had to hang a steak around their neck just to have the neighborhood dogs play with them; one who proclaims himself a great coder when he’s really just a two-bit hacker, et cetera. I mean, it’s pretty clear that the modifier “self-proclaimed” isn’t a positive thing, no?

Self-proclamations are, of late, right up there with rampant abuse of superlatives on the list of things that absolutely, utterly drive me up the wall. In fact, you might say that I consider myself to be the world’s greatest hater of self-proclaimers.