Dear Auntie Mac,
I have a question. I work as a cashier at a busy grocery store and sometimes customers come through, and I notice they have something lodged between their front teeth, like a bright green piece of lettuce. Do I tell them? If it’s a friend, I always do. But strangers? Common courtesy? Or insulting? I don‘t want to embarrass anyone, but I don’t want anyone to be embarrassed later, especially if they are meeting someone important next.

A Caring Cashier

My Dear Neighbor:
Your question is both timely and prescient (and Auntie Mac thanks you for allowing her to use “prescient” in a sentence). In fact, an examination of it reveals its root conundrum as a microcosm of a larger issue that we deal with daily, and increasingly, to our own detriment.

There are situations in which we find ourselves confronted by an absolute abnormality, as plain to us as let us say a leaf of lettuce wedged between a stranger’s teeth. More and more often, out of what we console ourselves is a sense of propriety and concern for others’ feelings, we hesitate to point out the glaring error, but wonder, later, if it would not have been more helpful to just identify the obvious before more harm was done. What is really going on underneath the sheen of gentility and “fear of insulting” someone is fear for ourselves—for the lettuce-wearer to not appreciate our assistance, for others to judge us for speaking up, for us to be “noticed” and marked as a troublemaker (even if those judging us are as inconsequential as nameless shoppers in a grocery queue whom we will never meet again). In other words (and Auntie Mac has quite a few of them), we more and more value our own emotional comfort over speaking out and rendering a helpful and honest, although possibly temporary painful, kindness that allows the unknowing wearer of leftover lunch the ability to quickly change course and venture forth with an unblemished smile.

Auntie Mac will now descend from the extension ladder of metaphor and offer this real-world advice, dear, in case you may have missed it: When doing a kindness for others (and you yourself know it is a kindness), first admit to yourself that it is for yourself that you are concerned, in your wish to avoid possible negative feelings directed at you, and then find a way (and there are many) to inform the person in question of the issue without drawing the interest or attention of those around.

And even after you have done your best to point out this improper wearing of greenery discreetly, you will most likely find that the recipient’s reaction is to include everyone within earshot in an elaborate outburst of gratitude, apology, semi-comical pronouncements of how embarrassing that would have been, etc. Your good deed, then, will be shared with the recipient by many, in the exact opposite manner that you feared.

Speaking truth to salad has a way of doing that.
Your Auntie Mac