Passive aggression

People who try to undermine you by making comments or behaving in a way that they know will unsettle you, eg

Sulking, instead of telling you what is troubling/annoying them. Ditto long silences.

Paying you a back-handed compliment - my mum never forgot her sister-in-law saying "you look really nice when you've got your make up on even though you're quite ordinary"

Always making negative comments about you or trying to make you feel stupid.

Gabrielle56 Not daft labels but rising from a our much greater knowledge of people and their problems rising from development in psychology and psychiatry over the last 50 plus years.

It sounds 'needy' to me - a person who doesn't pull their weight and relies on your assistance - really annoying at work - and they seem to get away with it. Even more infuriating, they tend to be the ones who are made redundant, with a nice settlement!

We have a lovely lovely man at work who won't learn tech and has an air of despair when asked to do something, say with a spreadsheet. No matter how often you show him, because he doesn't like doing it,
he feins incompetence until you just do it for him as its quicker than keep trying to show him how. Colleagues who are sick of helping him call it weaponised incompetence. I'm not sure if that's the right expression to be fair but he does go round everyone at different times for different tasks so that he's not putting on the same person all the time.

Hall-Flavin, M.D. Passive-aggressive behavior is a pattern of indirectly expressing negative feelings instead of openly addressing them. There's a disconnect between what a person who exhibits passive-aggressive behavior says and what he or she does.

Oh my ex husband had amazing skills..and absolute passive aggressive genius.
Door slams and thumping into things or banging stuff down loudy..I'd jump or twitch or say 'all ok?'and he would huff at me 'yew why wouldn't everything BE OK!'
If I didn't want to be intimate more than once a day, he would wait for me to be almost asleep then roll over huffing loudly then keep kicking until i had no duvet then say there was plenty of room... cut my veggie food with a knifethat had just had ham on for instance then say I was 'bizarrely over sensitive '
Passive aggressive to me is a cowardly way of trying to worry or manipulate someone whilst maintaining you're acting in an appropriate way.
Is that what you mean?

I think a friend (?) was being p-a when she produced a very formal tea (home-made scones, cream and jam, china cup and saucer etc.) and said how disappointed she had been to be given a mug of tea and a biscuit at a neighbour's.
Actually, that's what I would have given her too, as she knew quite well. I just said, this is lovely, you are such a perfectionist. Which was p-a on my part, come to think of it.

I have to admit, I had to look up the definition of passive- agressive. In my younger days, that was what we used to call a sulky-teenager, like 'Kevin' as played by that comedian. I think it was Harry Enfield.

Eloethan

People who try to undermine you by making comments or behaving in a way that they know will unsettle you, eg

Sulking, instead of telling you what is troubling/annoying them. Ditto long silences.

Paying you a back-handed compliment - my mum never forgot her sister-in-law saying "you look really nice when you've got your make up on even though you're quite ordinary"

Always making negative comments about you or trying to make you feel stupid.

When my children excitedly told a neighbour it was my 30th birthday she told me I looked very good - pause - for my age!

It actually made me laugh and much more aware that her sugary sweetness was a mask!

the type of passive agressive I came across as an instructor and as a lecturer, is where someone may be doing something in a wrong way, you show them the way it should be done , they nod and then carry on doing it the old way - with the "I've always done it that way. Makes no attempt to try new method etc. When there is a change in procedure in a firm, this is often the case. Or they may attempt to do it the new way whilst you watch but the next day they are back at the old routine. So with international companies you were wasting your time working with usa in the morning, as they had not started work , but could clear your european work and then go on to american stuff, Most efficient and you could actually get immediate answers in areas, but the p/ag would revert to their way and look at you in a challenging way to see if you would notice or do anything (I always did!

Some 20 years later, my offspring still bring up my solution to a DD's passive aggression.

On one occasion when, as a teenager, she slammed her bedroom door; I simply got my tools and removed the door.