Terribly Sorry

I've been wanting to write about the persistantly apologetic Brits for quite some time now, but have been either too lazy, too tired, or too busy. In today's Sunday Times there is a great little article that does the talking for me, so I just had to put it up here. It's cheating, so I'm terribly sorry about that (damn! now it's happening to me!). The following article is an extract from a soon to be released book by AA Gill, The Angry Island:

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If they couldn’t queue they would kill ...
by AA GILL

Never undervalue the pleasure an Englishman can extract from being both right and angry simultaneously.

If you ever find yourself on the sticky end of an Englishman with a righteous grievance, and you want to wound him mortally, capitulate instantly and apologise profusely — you will see a look of agonised consternation on his face, a childlike disappointment. You have taken away the bone he was so looking forward to picking.

I did it in a hotel once. I checked in ahead of a middle-aged couple who’d had a bad flight and, finding themselves abroad, were girding themselves for 10 days of unremitting grumble and complaint. They couldn’t believe their luck when, not paying attention, I barged to the front of their two-person queue.

Discovering that I was also from home was added sand in their factor 30. A foreigner would have shrugged and rolled his eyes, but I would have to take it like an Englishman — except that I’m not, and I wasn’t about to. I know these people. I know where this leads.

The English queue because they have to. If they didn’t they’d kill each other. The pressure of boiling anger in the average post office is only contained by the shared knowledge that this is as fair as can possibly be arranged in this life. They would rip the head off Mahatma Gandhi if he tried to renew his TV licence ahead of them. The English queue where the rest of the world barges because the English need to queue. It’s the tail of the mythic beast; tails add balance and equilibrium.

So I said sorry, abjectly, to the English couple and I smiled beatifically. Now if there’s one thing an Englishman can’t abide it’s an apology before he’s finished. Combined with a smile, it’s akin to sodomy without an introduction.

For a few seconds the Englishman closed his eyes, trying to pretend he hadn’t heard, but his biblical righteousness was running away, his plug was pulled. He followed me like a puffing, bulgy-eyed pug and said finally: “You can’t just say sorry. You can’t just say sorry, you know. I demand . . . I demand an apology.”

Only an Englishman could have said that, and only someone who’d lived with the English could understand that it wasn’t a tautology or a contradiction.

If England’s default setting is anger — lapel-poking, Chinese-burning, ram-raiding, street-shouting, sniping, spitting, shoving, vengeful inventive rage — many of the traits and tics that make the English so singular and occasionally admirable are the deflective mechanisms that they’ve invented to diffuse anger. The simplest and most straightforward an apology. The S-word.

Eskimos, they say, have dozens of words to describe snow. The Japanese have any number to differentiate rain, the French have a mouthful of facial expressions for “I don’t care what you think” and the Italians a fistful of hand gestures for exclamation marks, and the Welsh have five glottal stops for “I must have left my wallet with my other wife”. But the English, who have by far and away the largest, biggest, most immense, enormous, vast, gigantic, walloping, king-sized, voluminous, thumping, whacking, macroscopic, megalithic, lusty, humdinger of a vocabulary available to any human voice-box, choose to go the other way around and pack meaning into one word.

It was an American who pointed out to me the many subtle and contradictory back-handed and double-dealing ways the English manage to staple onto saying the S-word. He had noticed the light and airy sorry that the middle classes hailed him with when they committed some social infraction, said with a rising and falling inflection like a speed bump negotiated by a Bentley. Sorr-ee.

There are many, many ways of saying sorry. Being English is having to learn how to say all of them. There is: sorry, I apologise; sorry, I don’t apologise; sorry, you can take this as an apology but we both know it isn’t one; sorry, will you shut up; sorry, empathy; sorry for your loss; sorry, I can’t hear you; sorry, incredulity; sorry, I don’t understand you; sorry, you don’t understand me; sorry, excuse me; sorry, will you hurry up; sorry, I don’ t believe you; sorry, I’m interrupting; sorry, this won’t do; sorry, I’ve reached the end of my patience; sorry, sad and pathetic — as in, sorry excuse or sorry little man.

You can probably identify more variations on sorry. Sorry is a prophylactic word. It protects the user and the recipient from the potentially explosive consequences of the truth.

Being able to apologise without meaning it, without therefore losing face, but at the same time allowing the other person to back down, having got their apology, is a masterfully delicate piece of verbal engineering.

The English have arrived at a way of being furious without being rude. If you listen to them complain in shops or restaurants or about service in general they almost invariably start with “sorry”. You know that a customer sending back his soup, saying “Sorry, this isn’t very nice” isn’t apologising, and the waitress replying “I’m sorry you didn’t like it” isn’t either.

If you speak English as a native tongue, you decipher these nuances without thinking. If you’ve learnt the language abroad, or don’t speak it very well, then you just think the English are cringingly, obsequiously apologetic all the time and are possibly the politest people in the world.

The only other word that comes with so many meanings is “f***”. And if you don’t understand the incredibly fine and expressive definitions of that — from explosive pain, to happy surprise, to simple punctuation — then you might also imagine that the English are contrarily at the same time both the rudest and the politest people in the world. And as it happens, both assumptions are equally true.

[ source: The Sunday Times October 30, 2005 ]

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Both K and I sometimes feel like such utter heathens over here because we don't say "Please", "Thank you" and "Sorry" enough. I think I'm even worse off because not only have I been raised mostly in the US, but I have an innate Scandinavianess from my first 8 years in Denmark. In Danish, there isn't even a word for "please"! It is instead implied through tone of voice or context. Americans are generally polite, using the above niceties modestly, but appropriately. That's why when one interacts with Brits, one can start to feel a bit inadequate in the manners department. A typical interaction at a checkout in a British supermarket might go something like this:

Cashier: "Hello. Do you need help with the packing?"
Customer: "No thanks."
Cashier: "Do you have a Tesco card?"
Customer: "Oh sorry, yes. Here it is. Sorry."
Cashier: "Thank you."
Cashier rings up the customer's groceries, perhaps chatting about the weather while doing so.
Cashier: "That's £45.13, please."
Customer: "Thank you. Can I use my debit card, please?"
Cashier: "Certainly."
Customer: "Thank you. Sorry, could I also have £20 cash-back, please?"
Cashier: "Of course. Please key in your pin."
Customer does so.
Cashier: "Thank you."
Customer: "Thanks."
Cashier: "Your receipt and £20. Thanks. Have a good evening."
Customer: "Thank you, and you!"
Cashier: "Thanks!"

That may seem like an exaggeration, but it really isn't. I've been training myself to say "Please", "Thank you", and "Sorry" at every opportunity. It's not easy! K was actually scolded by an uncharacteristically rude customer at the Theatre Royal once because she didn't say "Please" and "Thank you" enough! Admittedly, that's not a common occurance, but it happened nonetheless.

Another example... the other day on the train, I was tickled because there was a murmur of Sorries, Thankyous, and Pleases rippling through the passengers on the train. Some where talking on their "mobiles" and some to other passengers, their conversations liberally sprinkled with these pesky politenesses. I'm not sure why it leapt out at me that time; it was just a funny little moment. Sorry, sorry, please, sorry, thanks, sorry, please, thank you, sorry, please, please, sorry, thanks.

Speaking of which, I must apologize for this very long blog entry. I'm terribly sorry. But I must say Thanks for reading it! Please do call again!

-RP-

PS- For an additional extract from AA Gill's book, go here.