British people say “sorry” on average nine times a day, according to research by Babbel, a German language learning app – the upstart Duolingo. Foreigners were baffled that it was so often, and I was baffled that it was so infrequent.
I said it that many times just going once round Tesco Metro (I can’t even process how many times I’d be sorry in the mega-store):
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Sorry (you are between me and a basket, you ought to have foreseen this, there is only one basket-station. Now that you haven’t, all we can do is mourn);
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Sorry (I slightly trod on you);
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Sorry (you’re clearly one of those people who still observes a one-way system, post-Covid, and even though I plainly disagree with this, otherwise I’d also do it, I sympathise with your vexation);
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Sorry (you’re going way too fast and that’s why we nearly collided, so really you should be sorry, except you seem a bit high, so I am sorry for your predicament);
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Sorry (we both reached for the same thing, yet the stakes are low, there are 17 more);
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Sorry (I joined the queue in the wrong place);
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Sorry (you joined the queue in the wrong place);
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Sorry (shop assistant, you are very slow to approve my age-sensitive purchase, considering you could ID me from space);
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Sorry (that my Clubcard isn’t scanning, person behind me, even though I 100% guarantee that yours isn’t going to scan either).
This is why foreigners don’t understand us; not because of “British understatement” or even our fabulous heuristic of saying the opposite of what we mean, but because the word “sorry” has infinite potential meanings – its intention can change in the middle of saying it. Probably – at a maximum – one time in 10 it means “I did wrong, and I apologise”. Maybe predominantly it means “you did wrong, but no hard feelings”. It can mean, “we’ve both slightly transgressed one another’s boundaries, and this is me signalling that life is too short to thrash out a shared norm, while at the same time, not being ready to completely surrender”. And this is just the sorries in a shop, with absolute strangers, no expectations, no consequences.
A lot of the sorries identified by linguists are actually so strikingly pass-agg, so much like a punch in the face, that I’d never use them unless I was muttering at the radio (as I was, twice in this two-day experiment: “I’m sorry, Conservative former minister, it’s simply not true that you can self-diagnose a mental illness and then get disability benefits”; “Sorry, gentleman on Magic FM, that isn’t how carbon offsetting works”). It’s like conjugating verbs in ancient Flemish: you can use the sarcastic-correction sorry, but only in these very precise circumstances; in private to yourself; as a joke; or on TV.
I stepped out of the house and went for a coffee where, after my first cup, I said a genuine “sorry – can I have another double espresso?” It meant a lot – I would hate to parade my caffeine dependency without shame; I don’t want to put you to a repetitive task five seconds straight after you last did it; yet I do understand commerce, and if I had thought you really minded, I’d have gone with: “I’m really, really sorry.”
After that, the gamut of maternal sorries; “sorry you’re too hot” (you are whining, I cannot control the weather); “sorry I didn’t wake you up” (you should have woken yourself up); “sorry there’s no oat milk” (just drink milk). I guess that starts as a jujitsu move, if you apologise enough, they’ll realise that they shouldn’t have complained in the first place? A kind of Basil Fawlty, “the management is processing your complaint, and all he can do is extend his heartfelt contrition, and then have a nervous breakdown”. It doesn’t work, at all. I don’t even know if they know I’m drawing on a deep cultural well of fake apology.
Factor in the sorries of the road – hand-signal sorries; eyebrow-yikes, sorry!; more sarcastic “sorry your indicators seem to be broken” – and by the time you sit down to do any kind of work, the currency has been debased, and if you’ve done anything even mildly wrong, that you actually do all the time, like take two days to reply to something, you’re heading towards “so so so so sorry”; “I want to shoot myself in the face, I’m so sorry”.
It’s all pretty easy to decode, at least from the inside. The hard thing would be to stop doing it.