SorryWatch reader Pablo pointed us toward this wonderful song by Christine Lavin, “Regretting What I Said to You When You Called Me at Eleven O’Clock on a Friday Morning to Tell Me That at One O’Clock Friday Afternoon You’re Gonna Leave Your Office, Go Downstairs, Hail a Cab to Go out to the Airport to Catch a Plane to Go Skiing in the Alps for Two Weeks.”
It’s not a bad apology! She doesn’t say she’s sorry for “what I said” — she TELLS the apologizee she recalls exactly what she said and why it was, uh, overkill. She says she’s sorry for her hyperbole, but not for her anger. (“I don’t really want to see you dismembered by the marijuana-sniffing dogs when a simple little nipping would suffice.”)
Legit.
That title is longer than Hoagy Carmichael’s “I’m A Cranky Old Yank In A Cranky Old Tank On The Streets Of Yokohama With My Honolulu Mama Singing Those Beat-Oh, Beat-Oh, Flat-On-My-Feet-Oh, Hirohito Blues.”
I have done the same thing a few times. It can be really confusing sometimes, for the person I am apologising to when I apologise for one thing (but) not another thing.
I was taught that ‘but’ is the mating call of the asshole and that it has no place in an apology. That part of apologising is getting my ego out of the way so as to better understand where the other is coming from.
What do you thunk?
Sounds good! (Was the post you meant to comment to?)