In Fox\u2019s \u201cWatching the English\u201d she examines the English use of the word \u2018sorry.\u2019 The final conclusion is that English people will say \u2018sorry\u2019 even if you bump directly into them. While she is careful to say that this does not necessarily make the English more polite than other cultures, she fails to examine it from a perspective that I consider very important (because I\u2019m soft and easily offended and also quite sensitive.) I, for one, do not particularly appreciate the \u2018sorry\u2019 that one receives when one bumps into a passerby. I feel bad, I usually say something like, \u201coh, no, it\u2019s fine, my bad.\u201d This sentiment, though, is rather ridiculous, because when I turn to tell them it is not a big deal they are long gone and completely oblivious. This is not what offends me though. It is that when someone runs straight into me, I get the same half-hearted sorry! They didn\u2019t mean sorry in the first example, which is fine, but in the second one they clearly don\u2019t mean it either! So here I am, walking to the tube, I\u2019ve got a backpack, my \u201cLondon A-Z\u201d out, and some bozo comes flying around the end, nearly sending me sprawling, knocking my aviator shades (which, by the way, were designed in Italy) off my head. And what do I get, as this hurried Londoner rushes by? The same little \u2018saw-ree\u2019 that Lawrence Taylor would receive , if he, in a cocaine induced rage, blindsided an elderly woman. In the end, all the Brits should truly be sorry for, is that they\u2019re not sorry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Fox\u2019s \u201cWatching the English\u201d she examines the English use of the word \u2018sorry.\u2019 The final conclusion is that English people will say \u2018sorry\u2019 even if you bump directly into them. While she is careful to say that this does not necessarily make the English more polite than other cultures, she fails to examine it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":442,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6690],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2010-michael"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/442"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3281\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}