Heartspeak: Sorry, not sorry

The messy weight of older words

Heartspeak is a series of posts about the old words from the Anglo-Saxon core of the English language, words who have had time to carve out deep trenches and cast wide nets. They are words which are as imprecise as they are impactful.

There’s good advice out there that a real apology has three components: 1. Admission of what you did, 2. Recognition of the harm your action caused the other party, and 3. Attempts to make amends or make a change in behavior.

But the way we use the word ‘sorry’ doesn’t really, discretely reflect the concept of an apology, and a lack of an explicit understanding of the various usages for ‘sorry’ seems to cause a lot of miscommunication and hurt feelings.

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Sorry, etymologically, derives from the same root as ‘sore’ – it’s got that little -y that turns nouns like ‘fish’ into adjectives like ‘fishy’ – and thus in the development of the word and phrase, it was used to express the emotional pain of the speaker.

You can see this echoed in the ways that some of our linguistic cousins “say their sorry”: German es tut mir Weh or es tut mir Leid is literally, ‘it causes me suffering’, Spanish los siento is literally ‘i feel it’, and French je suis désolé is literally ‘I am distressed’. If this is directly tied to any of the three components of a proper apology, it is the second, in that the recognition of harm you caused someone else is associated with your own empathetic resonance, that you feel some echo of the pain that you’ve caused.

This aspect of ‘sorry’, that it’s core historical meaning is a representation of pain, is why we say “sorry” outside of the context of an apology. “I’m so sorry for your loss” said to someone experiencing the death of a loved one is not an admission of wrong doing, it’s a signal of your emotional resonance with their experience. This is a purely empathetic ‘sorry’, and its bridge to the apologetic ‘sorry’ is in that expression of personal pain.

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The apologetic sorry may not even necessarily carry any of that empathetic connotation. If you cause harm to someone, you may experience painful negative emotions in response, but this might be the emotions associated with a purely selfish fear of social rejection or damage to relationships, a fear of being externally or internally labeled a “bad” person, rather than an expression of emotional resonance with the one you have wronged.

You are saying you’re sorry to indicate that you feel bad about an action that may have damaged your reputation or relationships, and thus the use of the apologetic sorry is an admission of guilt that serves as a bid for social repair. Most kids, it seems, go through a phase where they learn that a tearful, agonized “I’m sorry” can get them out of the negative repercussions of their actions. The apologetic sorry can be strictly supplicating – “I did a bad thing, I’m scared you hate me for it, please tell me you don’t hate me” – and in this case can accomplish parts 1 and 3 of a “good apology” without really getting to number 2 in any meaningful sense.

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It’s this complex semantic and pragmatic map of the word sorry that makes it so fraught in our modern discourse.

There is simultaneously a rise in calls for greater accountability in public and private life, while at the same time, we (women especially) are told to “stop saying sorry”. People are given the career advice to say “thanks for waiting” instead of “sorry I’m late”; the supposed problem is that the sorry-er is unnecessarily admitting wrong doing and thus denigrating their image, when in fact the real issue, if there even is one, is that the sorry-er is expressing their discomfort and asking for something.

We are sometimes irked by the apologetic sorry precisely because it can be supplicating, because it can be a plea for validation, and in our irritation at being asked of, we try to police and remove the empathetic sorry because we can’t often tell the difference between the two.

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Purpose. Like much of the core of our Anglo-Saxon heartspeak, ‘sorry’ bundles together a bunch of concepts that more precise language would keep distinct: I feel alienated, I feel your pain, I admit wrongdoing, please restore the social order that gives me life, I know I owe you repair.

It’s the nature of these heavy, simple words that they map a wide potential of meaning and emotive power, their value relative to more precise words (“I apologize”) born explicitly from their range and messiness.