When I was 45 or so, I learned what “subtext” means.

It was a lawyer who said it to me – “There’s no subtext” – on the phone, and from his context I gathered that he used the word to signify he meant what he was saying to me with no hidden or second message.

He’d recently inherited the position of managing partner from an ethical man with whom I enjoyed a satisfying business relationship. He was a different type of person than his predecessor but I didn’t know that yet; I assumed he was honest and clear.

Well it turned out he was a creep and a crook. He tried to steal time from me. We made an agreement about each of us doing our parts to terminate his company retirement plan. He was to perform his acts by a certain time and I would then do mine for a certain fee. He failed to hit his deadline. He tried to blame me for that failure, claiming his delay was owing to a question I’d already answered, and then he tried to coerce me to do the extra work necessitated by his delay, for no extra compensation. It was when he started trying to blame me (“I have no complaints about all you’ve done for us to date”) that he used that “subtext” phrase, and at first I took him at his word and continued conversing with him. But as soon as I dug my heels in and refused to do extra free work, he started ranting. He dredged up imaginary past complaints. He threatened to blacklist me.

Of course I didn’t do the extra work. Of course he made no dent in my business life. Of course he went on to build a sleazy reputation for himself.

I thought at the time, “how odd, that the very person who uses the word subtext and claims to not engage in it is doing it so much,” but that started me noticing.

I didn’t know it then, but there was a frenemy right in my small office. It wasn’t until she left and tried to make work more difficult for me and get more money than her already-unearned overpay, after she looked me in the eyes and pre-apologized for letting her husband try to bully me, that I understood how truly murky and messed up she was. I thought she was speaking wisdom when she once commented about an acquaintance: “she ought to get out of her own way and stop tripping herself.” Later I learned that the reason my co-worker knew that phrase was that it mostly applied to herself!

Beware, kids. When pithy words emerge from the mouth of a murky soul, look to the speaker. It’s really about him or her, and not about you.