all, and the Royal Navy’s is simply “This team works.” The desire to do something like run a marathon purely for the sake of achieving a “personal best” time or proving to themselves that they can do it doesn’t embarrass Americans. Neither does being told by a clothing company to “Do one thing every day that scares you!” For the English, listening to an American talk about his health and fitness regimen just might qualify.
Sorry
In which we find out why the English refuse to apologize for their overuse of
sorry .
A recent survey concluded that the average English person will say
sorry
more than 1.9 million times in his lifetime. This may strike some as a conservative estimate. From this, one could deduce that the English are especially polite. This might be true if
sorry
were always, or even usually, a straightforward apology. It isn’t. The reason they stay on the sorry-go-round is that the word, in their English, is so very versatile. A. A. Gill, writing for the benefit of visitors to the London Olympics, bragged, “Londoners are just permanently petulant, irritated. I think we wake up taking offense. All those English teacup manners, the exaggerated please and thank yous, are really the muzzle we put on our short tempers. Thereare, for instance, a dozen inflections of the word sorry. Only one of them means ‘I’m sorry.’”
Here are just a few of the many moods and meanings these two syllables can convey:
“Sorry!” (I stepped on your foot.)
“Sorry.” (You stepped on my foot.)
“Sorry?” (I didn’t catch what you just said.)
“SOrry.” (You are an idiot.)
“SORRY.” (Get out of my way.)
“SorRY.” (The nerve of some people!)
“I’m sorry but . . .” (Actually I’m not at all.)
“Sorry . . .” (I can’t help you.)
It’s all in the tone, of course, and this is where
sorry
becomes permanently lost in translation. An American friend will never forget when she finally figured out that
sorry
can be a tool of passive aggression in England’s hierarchical social system—a form of dismissal. When she was a college kid in England and people gave her an apology that was not sincere, but meant to put her in her place, she would respond earnestly, “Oh, no, it’s okay! Don’t worry!” Why wouldn’t she? There are times when luck favors the ignorant.
The English have a reputation for being passive-aggressive because they seem not to be saying what they mean—at least, not with words. In English culture, an anodyne word like
sorry
takes on shades of meaning that someone from outside will notbe able to discern with any degree of sophistication, especially if he is from a culture that is more comfortable with confrontation, or one that condones a wider range of small talk among strangers. The English use
sorry
to protest, to ask you to repeat yourself, to soothe, and to smooth over social awkwardness as much as—if not more than—they use it to apologize. But most of the time, their object is politeness of a particularly English kind, to wit: politeness as refusal.
English courtesy often takes the form of what sociolinguists Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson have called “negative politeness”—which depends on keeping a respectful distance from others and not imposing on them. Its opposite, positive politeness, is inclusive and assumes others’ desire for our approval.
Only the Japanese—masters of negative politeness—have anything even approaching the English
sorry
reflex. No wonder visiting Americans are so often caught off guard, and so often feel they’ve been the objects of passive aggression or dismissal instead of politeness. Their misunderstanding of what constitutes politeness in England is not surprising, since Americans epitomize positive politeness.
When Americans say
sorry
, they mostly mean it. But, at least to English ears, they don’t necessarily mean anything else they say. Americans repeat seemingly empty phrases like “Have a nice
Sorry
In which we find out why the English refuse to apologize for their overuse of
sorry .
A recent survey concluded that the average English person will say
sorry
more than 1.9 million times in his lifetime. This may strike some as a conservative estimate. From this, one could deduce that the English are especially polite. This might be true if
sorry
were always, or even usually, a straightforward apology. It isn’t. The reason they stay on the sorry-go-round is that the word, in their English, is so very versatile. A. A. Gill, writing for the benefit of visitors to the London Olympics, bragged, “Londoners are just permanently petulant, irritated. I think we wake up taking offense. All those English teacup manners, the exaggerated please and thank yous, are really the muzzle we put on our short tempers. Thereare, for instance, a dozen inflections of the word sorry. Only one of them means ‘I’m sorry.’”
Here are just a few of the many moods and meanings these two syllables can convey:
“Sorry!” (I stepped on your foot.)
“Sorry.” (You stepped on my foot.)
“Sorry?” (I didn’t catch what you just said.)
“SOrry.” (You are an idiot.)
“SORRY.” (Get out of my way.)
“SorRY.” (The nerve of some people!)
“I’m sorry but . . .” (Actually I’m not at all.)
“Sorry . . .” (I can’t help you.)
It’s all in the tone, of course, and this is where
sorry
becomes permanently lost in translation. An American friend will never forget when she finally figured out that
sorry
can be a tool of passive aggression in England’s hierarchical social system—a form of dismissal. When she was a college kid in England and people gave her an apology that was not sincere, but meant to put her in her place, she would respond earnestly, “Oh, no, it’s okay! Don’t worry!” Why wouldn’t she? There are times when luck favors the ignorant.
The English have a reputation for being passive-aggressive because they seem not to be saying what they mean—at least, not with words. In English culture, an anodyne word like
sorry
takes on shades of meaning that someone from outside will notbe able to discern with any degree of sophistication, especially if he is from a culture that is more comfortable with confrontation, or one that condones a wider range of small talk among strangers. The English use
sorry
to protest, to ask you to repeat yourself, to soothe, and to smooth over social awkwardness as much as—if not more than—they use it to apologize. But most of the time, their object is politeness of a particularly English kind, to wit: politeness as refusal.
English courtesy often takes the form of what sociolinguists Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson have called “negative politeness”—which depends on keeping a respectful distance from others and not imposing on them. Its opposite, positive politeness, is inclusive and assumes others’ desire for our approval.
Only the Japanese—masters of negative politeness—have anything even approaching the English
sorry
reflex. No wonder visiting Americans are so often caught off guard, and so often feel they’ve been the objects of passive aggression or dismissal instead of politeness. Their misunderstanding of what constitutes politeness in England is not surprising, since Americans epitomize positive politeness.
When Americans say
sorry
, they mostly mean it. But, at least to English ears, they don’t necessarily mean anything else they say. Americans repeat seemingly empty phrases like “Have a nice
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