Visit theallusionist.org/sorry to hear this episode and find out more information about the topic
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, give language a sword and a ball of thread and strict instructions not to get eaten by a Minotaur.
This episode is all about apologies, one of the most important verbal transactions, and perhaps one of the most challenging, because as Elton John sang: hold me closer, tiny dancer.” Wait, wrong one.
“When I was down, I was your clown.”
“I miss the Earth so much, I miss my wife.”
“Can you feel the love tonight?”
“I’d buy a big house where we both could live.”
“It seems to me you lived your life like a candle in the wind.”
“Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, Saturday.”
Hang on, here it is: “Sorry seems to be the hardest word.” Got there in the end. I hate myself. I’d apologise for it, but I still chose to do it, so…
On with the show.
HZ: “Sorry if you’re offended.” “I apologise to anyone who thought I did anything racist/sexist/other.” “I regret the offence I caused” - let’s not make it about me -” I regret the offence caused.” “Sorry I was mean to you because you did THAT REALLY ANNOYING THING.” “I said I was sorry, can I go now?”
It has got to be better than this.
SUSAN McCARTHY: This is Susan McCarthy. I am a writer and author. I specialise in wildlife, animal behaviour, humour, and apologies.
MARJORIE INGALL: And I'm Marjorie Ingall, I too am a writer and author, and I too specialise in apologies.
HZ: And together they run SorryWatch, a website and Twitter account, throughwhich since 2012 they have been analysing the wording of public apologies and what makes them apologetic or not.
MARJORIE INGALL: What we always wanted to do with this website was to support good apologies and make there be more of them. We don't want to live in this land of snark. I mean, we can be really snarky, but we believe in redemption, or we wouldn't want to do this.
HZ: Why do you think people are so bad at this?
SUSAN McCARTHY: I think we're not taught how to apologise, most of us. I certainly wasn't, and I think many of us don't get good examples when we're growing up, alas. And also, when you apologise, you put yourself one down, and that's just not fun. So people avoid it.
MARJORIE INGALL: Yeah, you have to make yourself vulnerable. You know, we all want to be the hero of our own story, and apologising means acknowledging that sometimes you're the villain in the story, in somebody else's story. And, yeah, and it's funny, because we all recognise a terrible apology when we hear one, and yet somehow when we're the one called onto the carpet we all still, you know... The temptation to mess it up is very, very great.
SUSAN McCARTHY: If you apologise and you saved your pride, you probably apologised badly.
HZ: “Well, Helen, I’d expect you of all people to know that etymologically, ‘apology’ was a defence, no remorse or regret in it at all, so everyone who apologises without actually expressing that they’re sorry is really just acting in the tradition of the word. ...And this is why none of my friends talk to me any more. The etymological life is a lonely one.”
LAURA BEAUDIN: Living in Canada, we see a lot of apologies.
HZ: Yes. Britain's the same - someone steps on your foot and you apologise for having feet.
LAURA BEAUDIN: Yeah, you have a foot, so it's your fault. I mean, those kinds of apologies generally serve a different purpose than like an actual sincere apology. They're more to like ease a relationship.
HZ: This is Laura Beaudin, who wrote her MA thesis on public apology, and fauxpology.
LAURA BEAUDIN: This is an ongoing field of study. There's no lack of of material. And there's so many different ways for people to look at it. I specifically look at it through the lens of linguistics and speech act theory, because I think it's a way of breaking it down and finding a little niche to to make sense of the world. An apology is a speech act, because by saying certain words, you are performing an action of apology. You are repairing something.
HZ: There are certain essential components to an apology.
LAURA BEAUDIN: In order for a public apology or even an interpersonal apology to be successful, there's four conditions that have to be met. And so there has to be an act like an offence done by the speaker, or someone for whom the speaker is a formally recognised representative. So in a public apology, that can be the person who committed the offence, or it could be the CEO of a company that is issuing a corporate apology. In an interpersonal apology, it could be a parent apologising on behalf of a child who can't apologise yet.
The second condition is that the speaker has to believe that the apology recipient, or contextually relevant third party, believes that the act was an offence against the recipient. So that's a long-winded way of saying that you have to believe that the person you're apologising to or the group that you're apologising to deserves an apology. So you can't just say, "to anyone that was offended". You have to actually believe that the person or people that you're addressing deserve an apology.
HZ: So you can't just scream it into the wind and hope it seeps into someone's soul.
LAURA BEAUDIN: Yeah! The third condition is that the speaker regrets the act, the offensive act, or one of its consequences.And I think that this really works with public apologies, but also interpersonal apologies, because you may not regret something that you said. But you definitely regret the impact that it had on a relationship.
HZ: How does that work in practice? Because I can think of some celebrities who may not regret the action, but do sincerely regret the impact that reputational damage might have on their income.
LAURA BEAUDIN: That is a consequence of the action, and that's where it kind of comes down to what's actually in the apology. Because you have to show that you actually regret the damage that you've done in some way, and it can't really be for a selfish reason. HZ: OK, so regret the consequences for the person to whom you're apologising, rather than the consequences to yourself.
LAURA BEAUDIN: Yes. And then the last one is called the essential condition, and it's that the utterance counts as an apology. So you have to actually use speech strategies that show that the words that you're speaking are actually an apology. So if you mean it to be an apology and the other person accepts it to be an apology, then it counts as an apology. So it's not just "Well I said it as an apology and I mean it that way." It also has to count as an apology to the hearers. It can't be one sided.
HZ: How to accomplish that?
SUSAN McCARTHY: You have to say what you did, and you have to say why that was bad, and why they're entitled to feel bad, and you need to tell them that you're not going to do it again, and make a convincing case that you're not going to do it again.
HZ: At SorryWatch.com, Susan and Marjorie have a handy six-step guide to making a meaningful apology.
Step 1 - seems obvious but amazing how many people forget it:
MARJORIE INGALL: Say the words 'I'm sorry' or 'I apologise'. 'I regret'? No, regret is about how you feel. Apology and sorry are about how the other person feels.
Step 2: Say specifically what you're sorry for.
Step 3: Make it clear that you understand why you did a bad thing.
Step 4: Be really careful if you try to explain what you did, because it's so easy for that to become an excuse for what you did. That also can mean just letting the other person have their say, and taking it, when they want to tell you what you did.
Step 5: Explain the actions to ensure that this will not happen again.
Step 6: And if there is a way to make reparations, make reparations."
HZ: Is there a danger if you're saying, "I'm sorry for the specific thing I did to you," that you're re-traumatising the apology recipient by detailing the offence again?
MARJORIE INGALL: Yes. An important thing to consider is, "Does the person want your apology?" Sometimes, the intention is good, to go back to the people you've harmed, but they may not want to hear from you, and if they are not up for forgiving you, and you kind of know that, that's something you have to sit with. We are not comfortable sitting with our own discomfort and our own knowledge that we screwed up, and sometimes not apologising is a form of apology.
SUSAN McCARTHY: Yeah. And, you know, if you had an affair with their spouse, they might not want to hear from you, even if you feel really bad about it.
HZ: When apologising, it’s also important not to turn it into a situation where the recipient of the apology ends up having to comfort the apologiser.
LAURA BEAUDIN: One of the biggest things that bugs me is in an apology, when somebody tries to align themselves with the victims. And we see this more so, I think, in celebrity apologies than in corporate or strictly political apologies, because a lot of times celebrities will say, "Making my fans feel bad is the worst thing for me." And it's not about you in an apology. So that's one that we see come up a lot. And, "To think that any one of you felt this way is awful to me." Poor you!
MARJORIE INGALL: "I'm sorry! It's all about me!" I once had a neighbour lose her key and lean on my doorbell at 4am, and when I let her in she was like, "Oh, I'm terrible, I should die in a fire," and it's like, shut up, this is…
HZ: Well, that's not going to put you back to sleep at 4am if she dies in a fire -
MARJORIE INGALL: Not so much.
HZ: - because there’ll probably be the fire brigade and everything.
MARJORIE INGALL: I don't want to go, "No, you don't deserve to die in a fire." I'm angry, you woke me up at 4:00 in the morning, and, like, you self-flagellating about it doesn't mean that you didn't ring my doorbell at 4am.
HZ: Another part of the equation is who the apology is by and for. An interpersonal apology is a more straightforward transaction, between apologiser and recipient, individual to individual. But it gets more complicated with public apologies, eg a celebrity apologising to their following rather than to people they directly harmed; or a corporation or institution or state apologising for wrongdoing by the organisation or within it.
LAURA BEAUDIN: There's definitely a difference in participant structure in a public apology, then in an interpersonal apology. In an interpersonal apology, you are the offender, and the recipient is the person who was offended. And so it's a straight line from you to the person you offended, or from the person who offended you to you. But when you get into public apologies, there are a lot of different participant roles. So in a corporate apology, for example, there's three speaker roles: so there's the author of the apology, which may or may not be the same person that committed the offence - usually with a corporate apology, it's part of a team that writes this. So whether it's your PR or communications department, along with the CEOs and lawyers, and often external crisis managers get called in if it's a really bad thing. And then you have the principal, which is who the apology represents, which in a corporate apology is basically the corporation as a whole. And then you have the animator, which is the person who actually performs the apology, and that's usually not the same person that committed the offence in a corporation.
HZ: I wonder how corporations choose this person, hold auditions for whichever C-suite exec is best at sounding contrite but also blameless. But if you’re a head of state, you should be practising apologies into a hairbrush in front of your bathroom mirror, because this might well come up. Or should!
LAURA BEAUDIN: In a lot of cases when the government apologises, if it's for something that happened in the past - so, for example, the Canadian federal government apologised for historical offences against LGBTQ2+ people, they apologised in 2017 for historical oppression. Justin Trudeau apologised, and so he was the one apologising, but he was apologising on behalf of the Canadian federal government from like the 1970s, the 1980s. So he is their formal representative, even though he and his government hadn't committed the offence.
HZ: Do you think that's an easier apology to make when you're not culpable?
LAURA BEAUDIN: Oh, absolutely. And some would question whether or not that apology can actually be considered a true apology. It can, depending on like the reparations going forward, but it's definitely easier for apologising if you're apologising for something that you didn't do. So making an apology is more of a public statement than it is a reparation.
HZ: And I guess whether that is meaningful or not is up to the recipients.
LAURA BEAUDIN: And then you also have different hearer roles in public apologies. So you have the people who were directly victims, and then you also have what we call ratified overhearers. So these would be things like the media or the general public who you're not necessarily apologising to, but they're also going to be receiving your apology and having an opinion on it. And that kind of differs from an interpersonal apology because you're not going to actually get that kind of distinction.
HZ: What would you say distinguishes a good apology, a bad apology, and an apology that looks good but is bad?
MARJORIE INGALL: Susan made up a term for the latter, for that last one, which is "an apology-shaped object".
LAURA BEAUDIN: There's a lot of different discursive strategies that are used in fauxpologies that on first pass can seem like they're an apology. So if you want to give the person the benefit of the doubt or if you're not listening, people can get away with those kinds of apologies that actually don't mean anything. And we find this a lot in public apologies; a lot of times people will take only a little bit of responsibility. So an example of that would be, "My name is on the show and everything we do, and I take responsibility for that." So you're hedging the amount of responsibility you take. And so if you're hedging the amount of responsibility that you take for the offence that you're apologising for, then it can't really be an apology.
HZ: What are some other common fauxpology strategies?
LAURA BEAUDIN: Expressing ignorance - so saying that you didn't know what you did was wrong - that can be a big one; but also like hedges and qualifications of responsibility, so only taking responsibility for a small portion of what they did. And "it's not like me". The phrase "this is not who I am" actually comes up in a lot, or "this doesn't align with my values."
HZ: But, you know, if you did it, then it is part of who you are.
LAURA BEAUDIN: Exactly. You may not want it to be part of who you are, but if you did it, then it is part of who you are.
HZ: I'm interested in some of the linguistic constructions used where people dissociate themselves or they remove agency, like using adjectives instead of verbs, or using the passive voice, or the Louis C.K. one, he was like, "I have been remorseful of my actions." Oh, so you're not any more? It was just a passing ten minutes?
LAURA BEAUDIN: So that one comes up a lot. The most common way of dissociating is through passive constructions. But there's also the strategy of what we call nominalisation, and that's basically: instead of naming an action, you turn it into a noun. There was one that came up in Trudeau's apology to the Indigenous communities in Newfoundland and Labrador, where he talks about "the misguided belief" instead of "we believed" or "the government believed." So by calling it ‘a belief’ instead of 'the government believed' or 'we believed', you dissociate yourself from it because it basically makes it stand on its own as something else.
HZ: Passive voice also helps the apologiser to distance themselves from the offence. Or, be distanced from the offence.
LAURA BEAUDIN: "X was done" instead of "I did X." it makes a big difference in your personal agency or the agency of the person you're representing or the company that you're representing. It basically makes it seem like it was some anonymous entity that did this instead of you personally. And so it makes it easier to have this dissociation. One of the ways that people dissociate is by saying things like, "this practise was prejudiced" instead of "I was prejudiced." It's just a way of not taking responsibility. And so that really doesn't have any place in a successful apology, but it is one of the things that we see a lot.
HZ: Or they'll say, "We're sorry that offence was caused," rather than, "Sorry I caused offence."
SUSAN McCARTHY: "Offence happened."
HZ: Out of nowhere, just appeared.
HZ: So many ways to shuffle around words to remove the offence-causer from the act of causing offence!
SUSAN McCARTHY: "Wow, unfortunately, this product killed a lot of people." "Unfortunately, a lot of my constituents thought that I didn't think their votes counted."
MARJORIE INGALL: "Sorry it was misinterpreted."
SUSAN McCARTHY: It's interesting because you're supposed to take responsibility, and a lot of times people apologising will say, "I take complete responsibility, somebody else did it while I was out of town, and the people who turned purple should have known better than to take a product without reading the directions, and..." then they, step-by-step, they do not take responsibility.
MARJORIE INGALL: "I had no idea, but the buck stops with me."
SUSAN McCARTHY: Humans are just brilliant at trying to save their pride, and they come up with the most amazing stuff. And you can say, "I apologise for making you feel bad." "I apologise if what I said made you feel bad." You can just get further and further away from any responsibility or culpability with either word.
HZ: Yes, the conditionals seem like the point where you should probably just end the sentence.
MARJORIE INGALL: Correct. I had to make an apology to a friend, and I actually talked it through with Susan first, because I thought I was going to mess it up. Because the tendency is so much to go, "But you", you know, "I did that because you..." And it's very hard to leave the "you" out of it. It doesn't matter what they did. The apology's about what you did, even if they did something bad.
SUSAN McCARTHY: In personal apologies in particular, when you're apologising for something, one thing that's really hard for people to do is to isolate what they're apologising for from, in fact, the context. So you say, "I am sorry I snapped at you, but you were being so annoying." It's a terrible apology. Maybe they were being so annoying, and maybe that's a thing that it would really be good to talk about with them; but when you're apologising, it's not relevant. That ruins your whole apology. "You deserved it."
MARJORIE INGALL: We also dislike "for any hurt caused", "for anyone who was offended", because the "any" implies maybe it was no one. And it's clear that if you're apologising, someone was offended. It's not in any sort of airy-fairy situation. That's another way, again, it's all about distancing yourself from what you did.
HZ: Yeah, and removing agency.
MARJORIE INGALL: Yes.
SUSAN McCARTHY: If your castle is surrounded by people shouting with pitchforks and torches, and you're up on the battlements shouting, "Sorry if I caused any offence," you know you caused offence.
HZ: It can be quite a power move, though, just to admit you made the mistake. And that the defensiveness just makes them look worse.
LAURA BEAUDIN: I think that it's easier to admit a mistake sometimes in an interpersonal apology, because it's generally just between like two people or within your family or friends group. But when you perform a public apology, there can be a lot more ramifications. So you could lose your career, you could lose future opportunities, but you can also open yourself up to legal ramifications by admitting wrongdoing. And that's why a lot of public apologies are really carefully phrased.
MARJORIE INGALL: That's one of the things that makes me crazy, is because, if you actually look at the research, good research makes it very clear that that taking responsibility is what people want, and saying you're sorry in, say, a medical malpractice case, if it's a "sorry you were harmed", without taking any responsibility for it, the recipient for the apology is vindictive. And usually rightly. And when - and there's research about this in both legal and medical settings, that if you say "We're sorry, here's what happened, we're going to meet with you face-to-face and talk about what we learned from the situation and how nobody else is going to go through it" - jury verdicts are smaller if it goes to trial. Often it doesn't go to trial at all. You can offer a smaller settlement. But lawyers still resist so strongly this notion of taking responsibility. And there's something in the culture that has to change.
HZ: I suppose they’re just being cautious, because their client isn’t saying something that might come back to bite them if they say nothing at all.
MARJORIE INGALL: Right, and it just makes people angrier.
LAURA BEAUDIN: So one example that I like is from Condoleezza Rice's memoir. And she actually says, "We wanted to take responsibility, but we were advised not to, so instead, we expressed regret." In a typical interpersonal apology, you can say, "I really regret hurting you, I'm not going to do it again," and that stands on its own fine as a as an apology. But from a legal perspective and from a strict linguistics perspective, the act of expressing regret is separate from the act of apology.
HZ: In some public apologies, the words are so detached from meaning that I could read the text aloud over a gentle instrumental and release it as a Tranquillusionist.
If you’re not sure whether you’re dealing with an apology or fauxpology, it can help to read the text.
LAURA BEAUDIN: So when you're evaluating an apology, whether it's an interpersonal apology, but especially when it's a public apology, I think you need to detach the language that's being used, the actual words that are being used, from from the performance of an apology, especially if somebody has spent a lot of time in the public sphere, they're going to be trained on how to perform. And so they may seem very regretful, and they may seem very emotional. And a lot of times, that can be genuine; but I also think it's worth thinking about the language that's used and not necessarily the performance. So you can say the right words, but if you say them in an angry tone of voice, then that doesn't seem like a sincere apology. Or you can perform it perfectly and you cry at all the right times and become very choked up when you're talking about these things; but if the strategy or the speech strategies and actual words that you're using aren't true apology words, then that doesn't count, and I think people need to think really critically about that.
HZ: They also often seem unnecessarily long. And is that sort of like waving something in front of your face so that you're just too exhausted really to concentrate on the finer points?
LAURA BEAUDIN: Well, I think so, because there are a lot of different mitigating strategies that are used, so you'll find that the non apology strategies are actually a lot longer than the apology strategies. And that's the thing, like a lot of times these fauxpologies - they often use some genuine apology strategies.
HZ: So, watch out! But, fauxpology characteristics don’t necessarily equate to a fauxpology.
LAURA BEAUDIN: There's a lot of people that will say, "An expression of regret is not an apology," and that's something that you see a lot of times in a critique of somebody's public statement. But as soon as somebody says, "I regret X," they get critiqued as "Well, that's not an apology." And that's not necessarily true. And people can use a lot of fauxpology strategies and still have a successful real apology. It comes down to the balance of it, because in any sort of public apology, you're always going to find fauxpology strategies. I haven't come across one that doesn't have at least a couple. It's just if you have more fauxpology strategies and zero explicit expressions of apology, then it doesn't count. But you're always going to have some sort of defence, because you are trying to protect your public image. I think that naming what you're sorry for is important and then the other things are kind of just icing on the cake.
HZ: And getting out quickly, before you start to pull focus.
LAURA BEAUDIN: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think that overapologising, especially in interpersonal relationships, can make the other person feel like they have a responsibility to forgive you. And so one of the things that people will say in an apology is, "I ask your forgiveness," and that's pretty common in formal apologies. But I don't know if anybody has the right to ask for forgiveness. Because that also puts a lot of onus on on the person you're apologising to, because they have two options, they can either accept your apology and forgive you in order for you to save face, but also it's imposing on them and an apology shouldn't impose on the other party.
MARJORIE INGALL: We hate "Can you forgive me?" - I’m going to include you in the ‘we’, Susan.
SUSAN McCARTHY: Alright!
MARJORIE INGALL: I hate "Can you forgive me?" because forgiveness is a gift, and you don't get to ask for a gift. Nobody owes you anything. You owe an apology. They do not owe forgiveness. Maybe it's better for you not to expect to be forgiven.
LAURA BEAUDIN: I think part of knowing whether an apology is sincere can't be judged until you see a person's actions in the future. The words that you use can't be the only thing that you're judged on. You also have to be judged on the actions going forward.
HZ: It's hard work. I can understand why a lot of people dodge it.
LAURA BEAUDIN: Oh, absolutely. Apologies aren't performed in a vacuum.
HZ: The Allusionist is an independent podcast supported by you listeners, emotionally and financially. If you want to help keep the show going, there are three major ways: 1. become a Patreon at patreon.com/allusionist, for behind the scenes glimpses and spoilers; 2. sponsor the Allusionist, email info (at) multitude (dot) productions. 3. Tell someone else about the show - if a podcast-suggesting circumstance arises and you think they’d enjoy it. Don’t wake up your neighbour at 4am to suggest it, I expect that would ultimately be counterproductive. Although I appreciate the gesture.
Anyway, thanks to you all for being here! It’s nice to be back!
And now your reward for still listening right to the end, your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is:
noria, noun, a device for raising water from a stream, consisting of a chain of buckets revolving round a wheel driven by the current.
Try using ‘noria’ in an email today.
In this episode you heard from Susan McCarthy and Marjorie Ingall, they are writers and they analyse apologies at Sorry Watch, which you can find at SorryWatch.com and on Twitter @sorrywatch.
Laura Beaudin studies fauxpologies - you can read her MA thesis at fauxpolo.gy, that’s fauxpolo.gy.
I am on board with the portmanteau ‘fauxpology’, in case you were wondering, and am not at all sorry.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman; the music is by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com.
Thanks very much to Sam Pay for lending me his computer so I could make this episode when my elderly laptop died and then the replacement immediately died straight out of the box.
You can find the show on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @allusionistshow - if you’ve written a thesis about something language-related, tell me about it! And that’s where episodes arose such as Mountweazel and Two Or More about the word ‘bisexual’. Haven’t heard those? Well you can find all the episodes, and transcripts thereof, and the full dictionary entries of the randomly selected words, and further information about each topic, if you visit the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
