Why sorry seems to be the easiest word


The Age of Chivalry: The Knights of the Round Table

The Age of Chivalry: The Knights of the Round Table

Manners? They maketh man, of course.

When Henry Hitchings told people he was writing a book about manners, ‘no response was more common than those three words, pronounced in an elliptical style that wasn’t obviously either reverent or ironic.’

Ah, but it’s the English way. We’re hedging our bets, you see. We all think manners are vitally important. They oil the wheels of life.

Many of us would say that manners are in long-term decline, that people are ruder and more aggressive than they need to be and than they used to be. But do we always want to be constrained by them ourselves? Hence the ambivalence.

In the pantheon of national stereotypes, says Hitchings, English and manners go together like French and romance, or German and efficiency. He is only specifically talking about Englishness here. The Welsh and the Scots can go and write their own books on the subject.

Not that we invented manners, and nor do we have a monopoly on them.

‘A global history... would reach back at least as far as the 25th century BC, when the Egyptian vizier Ptahhotep issued a set of maxims about appropriate behaviour.’ In 1215 an Italian called Thomasin of Zerklaere wrote a rather grumpy-sounding poem on the subject, offering guidance on where to look when riding a horse - upwards, rather than one’s legs - and telling young men not to step on benches and women not to look over their shoulders.

But all our notions of courtesy and civility have their origins in chivalry. (Which was originally a collective term for knights who were ready for battle, typically mounted on horseback.) In the Middle Ages, disputes ceased to be settled by violence and started to be settled by negotiation. Warriors were supplanted by courtiers, codes of conduct came into being, and with them came the idea of self-control as a virtue. Hitching maps this process with great care and a terrifying depth of research, which has unearthed all manner of extraordinary facts. ‘The word ‘privacy’... would not gain currency until the 17th century, and even then was still sometimes muddled with the noun ‘privity’, a term for the genitals that had been used by Geoffrey Chaucer in the 1370s.’

In England we say sorry 204,536 times in an average life


What he is trying to do with all this is grasp that slippery customer, Englishness.

As we all know, it’s a mass of paradoxes. Here in England we say ‘Sorry’ a lot: an average of eight times a day, says Hitchings, or 204,536 times in an average lifespan.

‘The readiness of the English to apologise for something they haven’t done is remarkable, and it is matched by an unwillingness to apologise for what they have done.’ 

He has a tendency to use ‘they’ when ticking us off. Although he doesn’t mention it, this is a distinctively English thing to do, too.

But it’s a small island, four times more densely populated than France, ten times more so than the USA. Space, particularly personal space, is at a premium.

‘We carry around with us what I think of as an invisible hula-hoop, a portable boundary marker or buffer that others cannot see but are (we hope) able to sense.’

Victorian visitors to America were appalled to discover that they were expected to take their meals in a room shared with people they had never met. ‘Requests for privacy were met with derision and bafflement.’ We are the product of our very singular environment.

Hitchings is an indefatigable researcher: it’s only two years since his last book, The Language Wars, but his bibliography for this one stretches to 412 books listed over 26 pages, which is just showing off.

He is a lovely writer, full of interesting ideas and neat turns of phrase, and just occasionally I wished he had read slightly fewer books and put in a few more thoughts of his own.

But perhaps you do have to read that much to master the nuances of this vast and sprawling subject.

Good manners, he concludes, are essentially a matter of making little sacrifices. ‘Contrary to the old maxim, good manners do not cost nothing: they involve small amounts (usually very small, but usually noticeable) of delay, boredom and physical discomfort.’

And another form of good manners is acknowledging that this is the case. They do maketh man, after all.