When people call people "perfect"

I recently had an acquaintance call me a "wonderful, imperfect human being". I thanked her because it was a compliment and then told her it was interesting she had called me imperfect. People call me "perfect" very frequently - I don't say this to sound narcissistic but because it's actually true - and this was the first time I could remember anyone calling me "imperfect". Not that I minded it (it was actually quite refreshing) but I just wasn't expecting it.

She explained that we call people "perfect" so often when we just mean "really good", and this is not only inaccurate because people simply are not perfect but potentially damaging when people are people and do something less than perfect.

I thought about that and realized she was quite right, especially on that second point. As we all know, "perfect" and "people" are mutually exclusive, but as a person who is frequently called "perfect", I realized how damaging it can be when you're used to being perfect and then realize you're a person.

I've come to have very high standards of myself, and this is fueled when people call me "perfect". People tell me I wrote a perfect poem, I handled something perfectly, I have a perfect face, I said something perfect. Unfortunately, I believe them. 

Perhaps I can't help it; I tend to believe things that are believed by a fairly large number of other people, not because I'm interested in following a crowd mentality or incapable of independent thought but because if I'm the only one who believes something or one of the only ones who believes it, I'm more likely to doubt something. If something's true, it stands to reason that a lot of people would believe it. When something is true and people don't believe it, there tends to be a reason (either they haven't had it proven to them, it conflicts with what they were taught was true, it hasn't entered into their personal experience, etc.) It's not that everything widely believed is true so much as that, if a lot of people believe something, there's certainly something to the idea that it might be true. And if you have no way of knowing whether or not it's true by using your own judgment, or if it's something you'd like to believe, you're more likely to believe what everyone else believes.

I have no way of really judging my own worth or the quality of what I do. Again, very high standards, and I'll never meet them. I'd like to think I'm acceptable, and when people tell me I'm not just acceptable but the pinnacle of acceptability, the most acceptable anything can ever be - because that is what perfect means, after all - it makes sense why I go along with it.

But then I had an acquaintance explicitly tell me that I wasn't the most acceptable thing imaginable but still pretty great, and that was what I needed to hear.

She told me she was trying to stop referring to Simon Pegg (an actor she's come to really like) as "a perfect human" and instead call him "fantastic". Even if she doesn't mean she thinks he has literally nothing wrong with him, she's still saying it, and she's so used to saying it because people are so used to saying it. Realizing the implications of what you're doing and figuring out how to remove those implications so they're more in-line with your intent is a good way to make things better.

Maybe when people call me "perfect", they don't mean I'm literally flawless so much as they use the word because they've heard it so often and think it's an acceptable thing to say when they think someone or something is good. Reminds me of when C.S. Lewis said, "Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite." Don't say "perfect" when you mean "good". Otherwise, "perfect" will become a word that just means "good" and what'll you do when you realize that none of the things you were calling "perfect" were perfect after all?

I thanked my acquaintance for the compliment and her explanation. It's not all the time that someone gives you a compliment and a good piece of wisdom at the same time.