Alex Beam—the Globe’s resident curmudgeon, as the paper’s website brands him—had a terrific column yesterday about the virtue and scarcity of modesty.

Whatever happened to modesty? It is such a becoming trait. Did it die forever in the 1980s, when Donald Trump, Madonna, and Tina Brown embraced the “Look at me!” culture? “Conceit spoils the finest genius,” Marmee March tells her daughter Amy in Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women.” “There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will be overlooked long,” she continues, adding that “the great charm of all power is modesty.”

Among the people Beam suggests manifest modestly:

E.O. Wilson (multiple votes); writers Priscilla MacMillan and Richard Parker; Drew Faust (multiple votes); Derek Bok (What! No Larry Summers?); poet Frank Bidart; editor William Whitworth; sailor/mathematician Rich Wilson of Marblehead; Architects Collaborative cofounder Sally Harkness; MacArthur genius John Ochsendorf; Bishop Thomas Shaw; Roger Brown of Berklee College of Music; street doctor Jim O’Connell; Michael Dukakis, and Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farm.

Not, ahem, that my opinion matters so much, but I agree with Beam: Modesty is one of the rarest and most appealing of personal qualities. Isn’t it funny that the people who are modest are often the people who have the most to brag about, if they were so inclined, while the people who do the most bragging usually have inversely little in terms of achievement?

(That’s a ghastly sentence, but you know what I mean. I hope.)

Any nominations from you folks?

(I’m trying to think of someone who fits the bill…it ain’t easy.)

I thought of Beam’s column yesterday during a workout at my local gym, because “modesty,” of course, can have a slightly different meaning than the one Beam intends, a sense of physical restraint and decorum.

On one of the Stairmasters there was a clean-cut looking guy, maybe 30-something, wearing a t-shirt that read, “I Mow Your Mom’s Lawn.” Which of course means other than what it says.

I spent the rest of my workout trying to figure out why anyone would wear such a shirt, and never really came up with a satisfying answer….