Meta living through vocabulary

[j4]

Is there a word for the feeling you get when you've done something really badly (and taken a ridiculously long time over it) and then the person you did it for praises you and/or expresses gratitude, quite sincerely, apparently without realising how hopelessly bad it is?

It's not just false modesty or pathological perfectionism: it's knowing what is possible, knowing how much better one could have done something ("could" in real-world, practical terms, rather than "could" in theoretical, "given infinite time and resources" terms), combined with a feeling of despair that the person to whom you're delivering/reporting on this thing doesn't know and/or doesn't care that it could be done several orders of magnitude better.

Also, is there a word for the lazy rhetorical device of broaching a subject with "Is there a word for..."?

Comments

[j4.livejournal.com]

I don't think I've ever heard/read a Reith lecture -- I fear the analogy's lost on me...

[caramel-betty.livejournal.com]

They're sort of supposed to be a wonderful chance for national and world experts to expound on a given topic of some importance. And it's done over a number of lectures, which gives them the opportunity to perhaps lay the foundations in the first lecture for something really thought-provoking and challenging in the others. But...

This year's (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2007/) are being done by Jeffrey Sachs. And, as far as they go, they've been sort of interesting. Here's the BBC's brief summary of the topic:

Professor Jeffrey Sachs argues that the world is in a period of turbulent transition and that the biggest challenges need to be navigated by broader and deeper global co-operation.

And that's basically all he's done. The world is complex, people need to rise to the challenge, here are a few examples from history where people rose to challenges (with occasional insight into how), and then... nothing.