behind someone's back

Other songs showcase a similar emotional intelligence: “Is There Someone Else?” draws a moral line at sneaking behind someone’s back; “Best Friends” levels with a woman regarding the precise limits of what the narrator can promise.

The first are the angels: those whose innermost thoughts are already safely expressible, who never need to talk behind someone’s back because what they want to say is acceptable to deliver to their face, and who cannot have a throwaway comment come back to bite them because every comment is perfectly thought-out and expressed first time round.

I just find it cowardly to talk behind someone's back.

Okay, maybe sometimes my jokes are a little mean, but I only make those jokes behind someone’s back.

There is a kind of farcical element to this as well, the sort of things that happen whenever a language is imperfectly understood — and this is a bilingual series, certainly — with a new twist on what it means to speak behind someone's back.