Mind your language | 23 July 2011

Sorry

 ‘She was sorry Doctor Cameron objected to her maternal arrangements,’ wrote Anna Maria Bennett in her seven-volume novel The Beggar Girl and her Benefactors (1797). It is funny how fame and scandal are soon forgotten, for Mrs Bennett was a smash-hit novelist of her age. The scandal was her living for 17 years with an admiral (by whom she had a daughter, a celebrated actress who herself had a daughter by the Duke of Hamilton and went through a sensational divorce case). All forgotten.

By sorry Mrs Bennett meant that Dr Cameron’s objections made her character sad. Her character was not apologising for Dr Cameron. This meaning of sorry is categorised as sense 2b by the Oxford English Dictionary. Sense 1a is the one where the word is ‘often employed in the phrase “I’m sorry” to express mere sympathy or apology’.

There is a difference between mere sympathy and apology, but from a heading, ‘We are sorry’, in very large type at the top of a full-page advertisement last Saturday taken out by Rupert Murdoch, it was reasonable to presume that apology was meant.

As the text went on, this became less clear. ‘We are sorry for the serious wrongdoing that occurred,’ it says. The text is signed by Rupert Murdoch, who might be part of the ‘we’. Below are the words ‘News International’, so perhaps they are ‘we’. But occurred is not a word that pins down responsibility. When a penitent makes an act of contrition, he does not say that he is sorry for wrongdoing that occurred. He says (in the words of the traditional prayer): ‘O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee, and I detest all my sins, because I dread the loss of heaven, and the pains of hell; but most of all because I love thee.