AVOID THE “REFUSAL TO BE PLEASED.” Walter Jackson Bate points out that one of the recurring themes in both Johnson’s writing and his conversation is that it is common for us to believe that we are displaying judgment or taste by “unwillingness to be pleased.” Bate says that: “The ‘refusal to be pleased’…became almost an obsession of [Johnson's] as something to avoid and fight against, however obdurate his own impatience and quickness to irritability or despair.”
For some people, my maternal grandmother and my non-maternal mother, refusing to be pleased was a deliberate strategy, to motivate the surrounding peons to work harder to find something that finally WOULD please. Good luck.
This is certainly popular amongst Emory students. Enthusiasm, or professing to enjoy something leaves one vulnerable to criticism.
[...] REFUSAL TO BE PLEASED” (COMMENT). Nick and Mary Jane have both commented on my post on Samuel Johnson’s repeated use of the phrase “Avoid the refusal to be pleased.” [...]