Sydney Morning Herald , Australia
Nov 20 2004
Sorry for all the apologies
By Ruth Wajnryb
It might bemuse a visiting anthropologist from Mars to discover
within Earth culture a speech event loosely called “saying sorry”. If
s/he stays around long enough, s/he may discover that the sorry
speech event is an umbrella term for a diverse collection of
utterances (or sorry noises) that leaders of democratic nations emit
– or feel compelled to emit – usually at some symbolic occasion.
Anniversaries of genocides are good.
I say “democratic nations” because for the life of me I can’t
remember one such verbal engagement with the issue of sorriness
coming out of the mouths of tyrants. It’s not the Idi Amin Club
members who wrestle with apologetics. At the bookends of the 20th
century, descendants of the dispersed survivors of the Armenian
genocide and those of Saddam’s gassed Kurds are still waiting.
I’d like to propose “apologetics” (note the small “a”) as a
superordinate to cover all the verbal noises that accrue with the
issue of sorriness. The word refers both to the verbal act and the
rumblings that surround it.
A recent example comes from Tony Blair. Jeered on by anti-war
protesters outside the annual conference of the British Labour Party,
and with considerable visible angst (most angst, of course, being an
interior experience), Blair wrestled with his apologetics, struggling
to find a way between the simplicity of straight-talking and the
complex pressures of public opinion mixed with party constraints.
He refused to apologise for the Iraq war. “The world is a better
place with Saddam in prison, not in power.” When it came to
allegations about the “sexing up” of prewar intelligence reports,
Blair’s ice got thinner: he “admitted”, “acknowledged” and “accepted”
that evidence about the weapons of mass destruction “has turned out
to be wrong”. It was a tenuous path to walk – between the cajoling of
anti-war protesters (they who, strangely, only surface in
democracies) and the sensitive fact that, as he speaks, he has boys
in the field. Even amid the party faithful, “guarded” and “gingerly”
are the ways to go.
An apology means saying you’re sorry. This seems straightforward
enough until you poke at the scar tissue of history. Sometimes,
etymology offers insights. It was not until the 18th century that
“apologise” seriously took on the meaning of “a frank expression of
regret for wrong done”. Before that, its meaning was closer to the
Latin and the original Greek, apologia, where apo (from, off) and
logos (speech) combine to produce an account mounted in defence or
justification. In modern terms, think of the closing argument of the
defence lawyer.
English retains this original sense in its “apologist”, though this
too has been tainted by negativity. Alleged apologists usually deny
that they are. The pseudo-historian David Irving denies being an
apologist for Hitler even while uttering his absurd claims that
openly seek to exonerate or explain away or diminish the monstrosity
of Nazism.
If you key “apologetics” into case-non-sensitive Google, you get
almost a million hits. These are mostly (big-A) Apologetics – a
Christian term for the practice of defending the Christian faith
against those who raise objections to its validity. This usage more
closely resembles the original Greek sense.
Contrast is a great mechanism for discerning the less-than-obvious.
To grasp the navigational complexity of apologetics, consider the
sheer simplicity of an uncomplicated act of sorry. At
, Democrat-voting Americans apologise
for Bush’s re-election.
One is reminded that English allows both forthrightness and
obfuscation, each achieved through words.