Sorry for all the apologies  By Ruth Wajnryb November 20, 2004
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.