Apologies - Or Lack Thereof

Saying sorry - or not saying it - is back in the headlines in the wake of the Downing Street e-mail smears. While the word dates back to Anglo-Saxon times, its current use doesn't.

Would you know the difference in meaning between "I'm sorry" and "I apologise"? If you bumped into someone with your shopping trolley, you might use either phrase.

But what about expressing regret? For politicians the differences are key, and the choice of the right phraseology is vital.

At the height of the row over the Downing Street e-mails, the prime minister wrote to those unfairly slurred, saying: "Any activity such as this that affects the reputation of our politics is a matter of great regret to me."

For the Conservatives, this wasn't a "full apology". Nadine Dorries, one of the Tory MPs smeared, says she would have used the words "I'm so sorry" in the first two sentences of the letter.

On Thursday, the S word finally came - with Gordon Brown saying he was sorry for the e-mails sent by his close adviser.

But the very phrase itself would not have been heard in the way we now understand it before the start of the last century.

"The word sorry itself goes back to Anglo-Saxon times, but it originally meant distressed, sad, full of sorrow, full of grief," says David Crystal, author of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English language.

"The modern use, where it's just an expression of apology and regret, is actually very recent. It's only about 100 years ago that people started saying 'I'm sorry'."

Too impersonal

Professor Crystal told BBC Radio 4's PM that the English language is very short of words for expressing sorrow and personal regrets. Before "I'm sorry" came into common currency, much more complicated expressions had to be used.

"If you go back to Shakespearean times, you'll never hear the phrase 'I'm sorry' when people want to apologise. In his plays you'll hear phrases like 'I cry you mercy' or even 'I cry you mercy heartily' coming from his characters."

The evolution of the way the sentiment is expressed in English continued in the 18th Century, when the word apology came into use. Before then "apologia" had meant a very formal defence of some proposition or other.

"The word apology came along in the 1700s," says Professor Crystal, who points out that no sooner did it appear than it was being used mainly in the plural, apologies.

"It's almost as if one isn't enough. Quite quickly you get 'a hundred apologies' and 'a thousand apologies' and so on."

Other phrases also became popular because the basic old English word sorry wasn't considered to be enough, he says. Latin and Greek expressions - apologise comes from Greek - started to be used, along with "feel remorse", "express regrets" and "being mortified".

"But it's a very distancing, rather impersonal sort of language. That's why I think these MPs are saying just say sorry."

The former UK defence minister Des Browne famously came up with a tortured form of words that didn't go quite as far as saying sorry in 2007. It came after 15 Royal Navy sailors who had been captured by Iran were allowed to sell their stories to the media.

"It seems clear to me that I have expressed a degree of regret that can be equated with an apology," he told MPs in the Commons.

Put it right

In the US, President Barack Obama was rather more forthright when a senior politician he'd nominated for a key position in his new administration pulled out. "I screwed up," he said when questioned by the media.

So what would someone say if they wanted to express regret for a mistake, and take responsibility for it and for putting it right?

"If it were me, and I wanted to make the greatest impact, I would avoid the word sorry because it's had such a bad critical history," says Professor Crystal.

"I would certainly avoid all those Greek and Latin-based expressions and I would go back to one of the common idioms expressing sorrow. I'd probably say 'I'll kick myself'."