Some of those at the end make sense but the first one annoys me. "Thank you for your patience" only works if the other person had a reasonable alternative to waiting for you or if you are meeting them for something that is entirely for their benefit.
"Sorry I'm always late" only works if you have a smidgen of intention to actually leave earlier next time. I think thanking someone for their ongoing patience is preferable to that, otherwise. "Let's acknowledge that this is an ongoing imposition, and thank you for putting up with it."
But I know lots of people. Having to keep track of what they all mean by "meeting at 10:00" is a serious annoyance. I want to be apologized at for having to deal with it.
Maybe in that case the late person can say both thank you and apologize.
I mean, they sound like a real jerk.
I don't know. But I have a phone meeting at 10:00 and now I'm wondering when I should call.
With the chronically late person?
No. With the person who determines whether or not I move to the other end of the state.
I mean, he's chronically late but so is everybody I work with.
Maybe they're just in a different time zone?
The administrative assistant has an app to square away that.
I apologize to her a lot because I'm bad with receipts.
I definitely feel "sorry" is devalued in frequency these days, for whatever reason.
Generally we all hate micro-policing of people's word choice
Wait! Who is the "we" in this sentence?
I mean, they sound like a real jerk.
Good for you! Unfogged Orthodoxy has declared this construction superior to "he or she sounds like a real jerk."
15 to 13. I should have refreshed before posting. Sorry.
The cartoon feels kind of victim-blamy to me. I mean, the behaviours as described all seem like symptoms of depression and/or low self-esteem and yet the tone of the cartoon is "You're a bad person for expressing your personality in the natural way", which doesn't seem very constructive.
Thank you for me punching you in the face.
I hate talking about money but like having money. Maybe I need more self-esteem.
Somebody as great as me should have more self-esteem.
The one I always have trouble with it "You're welcome." Just feels awkward. I usually say "No problem" or "sure".
"De nada" works unless you're at a Tea Party meeting or something.
Yeah, not buying it. I couldn't tell what the purpose of the reformulations was until the end when they turned out to be some kind of mental health hygiene to help depressed people feel valued. I'm sure that'll work! And a lot of those phrases aren't really strictly interchangeable. "Thanks for understanding me" is presumptuous and weird if you're worried you're not being understood, for example.
This is just "Stop telling women to smile!" for depressed people, who, like alcoholics, think that everyone else is depressed in exactly the same way.
Alcoholics can still tell women to smile.
Why not thank people after saying you're sorry? Then you have the cathartic rush of openly apologizing for existing but all they have to respond to is the gratitude. I am pretty sure some thank-yous are as rote and self-abasing as any apology. Sorry I ruined gratitude.
I figured this would be more advice for women sending email in the workplace.
This is good advice. My theory is that you need to be in a "sorry" equilibrium in all of your relationships. If one side says sorry much more than the other, it is a problem. Go to town with the "thank you"s.
I have a manners question about work place emails, but not a gender specific one. I've been noticing my colleagues are sending more formally emails to me and others. That is, starting with "Dear all" instead of just "All" and closing with actual (but brief) valedictions. I blame Germans, but maybe this is a general thing.
Maybe they're just in a different time zone?
A friend at a big law firm here was once told by a very insistent colleague in the other end of the state that we were clearly in a another time zone.
Probably goes without saying which parties were male and female.
28: Put them in the spam filter. No one should have to deal with that shit.
"Dear all" is formal?
I worry I'm being too casual when I use it.
Dammit, I conflate two jokes:
Put them in the spam folder...
My spam filter picks up that sort of bullshit.
Whichever one is funnier, that's 30.
31: These are people I've emailed at least weekly for several years.
That is, starting with "Dear all" instead of just "All" and closing with actual (but brief) valedictions. I blame Germans, but maybe this is a general thing.
Do Germans still do that thing of starting a letter with the receipient's name, followed by an exclamation mark? As in
Dear Moby Dick!
Thank you for your letter...
That's something I could do with adopting. It conveys a sort of delighted surprise that is rather a nice thing to see at the start of a letter.
||
The demo/rehearsal version of "Smells Like Teen Sprirt" is remarkable for capturing about 90% of what's great about the instrumentals in the final, while the lyrics and vocal performance are almost complete crap.
|>
Heck, Japanese still (sometimes) use standardized seasonally appropriate weather observations following after the greeting, for which there are many purchasable guidebooks.
No remorse
No repent
We don't care
What it meant
Another day
Another death
Another sorrow
Another breath
War without end
The reason Canadians pronounce it "surry" is so that if someone tells them they apologize too much, they can just claim they were talking about the city in British Columbia.
If they make a big error, they do an elaborate apology with many embellishments. This is called "Sorry with a fringe on top."
My organization takes formality pretty seriously, and is also chronically unable to adapt to modern times. So "Dear _____" is the standard email salutation. It took me a long time to accept that, and I still rebel when I can get away with it.
17 sounds right to me. For any individual person who does this sort of thing, maybe they'd be better off perking up and not apologizing all the time, but a generalized instruction to "God, stop sounding like such a pathetic loser, maybe if you weren't so drippy you'd feel better about yourself" isn't going to help anyone.
But I was a little primed to be hostile, because I thought it was going to be a slightly different flavor of 'don't say sorry' -- the 'don't say 'I'm sorry' when something bad happens to someone else unless it was your fault'. It's perfectly coherent and idiomatic to express sorrow at someone else's misfortune even if it's nothing you should apologize for, and telling people they're wrong to do it is being a jerk.
#NotAllGermans
That hashtag is mostly about email style, right?
I'm not in the least bit sorry for 41.
I like "de nada" as a standard response to the standard "sorry", but from me it comes off as pretentious. I guess there are various equivalents in some English vernaculars, but not that I can use as they stand - "tain't nothin'," "ain't no thing". Maybe we can unite around "No thing"?
For me, the big issue with salutations is whether to use "Dr. X" or just the first name. Germans never use "Dr. X" when dealing with other Germans. British people really seem to want to use titles, even to the point of insisting on calling me "Dr. Hick" regardless of my lack of doctorhood.
Oh, and if the email is going to (or coming from) someone who is Latin American, its best to start with a line of "How are you doing? I hope things are well.... etc. etc." Even if you just emailed them last week.
Its weird. Sometimes I even get the impression that they actually care how I am doing.
I guess that partially explains why my Mexican correspondent thinks I'm an asshole.
the 'don't say 'I'm sorry' when something bad happens to someone else unless it was your fault'.
It's even more awkward to express thanks in this circumstance.
Yes. The "implied terminal asshole" is there in that case.
33: Likewise. If I were doing a one-on-one email I'd just say "Hi", but for some reason when I'm addressing multiple people, especially in my capacity as a boss, even if it's not a very formal message, I feel the need to go up a few registers.
If I were doing a one-on-one email I'd just say "Hi", but for some reason when I'm addressing multiple people, especially in my capacity as a boss, even if it's not a very formal message, I feel the need to go up a few registers.
CITIZENS OF EARTH!
Sometimes I even get the impression that they actually care how I am doing.
They're gaslighting you.
Sure, just assume everybody is here legally.
The cartoon feels kind of victim-blamy to me. I mean, the behaviours as described all seem like symptoms of depression and/or low self-esteem and yet the tone of the cartoon is "You're a bad person for expressing your personality in the natural way", which doesn't seem very constructive.
This seems totally off. Depressed people may do this stuff, but I do it a lot, just being female. When I played soccer, I would apologize constantly. Not that I should have been thanking anybody either, but there's a lot of knee-jerk apologies. If you actually have a sentiment under the knee-jerk apology, maybe just thank the other person instead.
Depressed people may do this stuff, but I do it a lot, just being female.
This is the thing I was prepped to be hostile about. Using a female-associated pattern of courtesy does not make you weak or wrong: in context, the word 'sorry' is not necessarily an apology or acceptance of wrongdoing, and no one who isn't being a jerk has genuine trouble distinguishing between 'I am apologizing to you because I was wrong' and 'something happened that inconvenienced you and I am expressing sympathetic regret'.
"I'm sorry you are having trouble separating my expression of sympathetic regret support for the patriarchy."
"Team" is the email salutation that gets on my last nerve. Yuck.
"Dear Children and Grandchildren of Nazis,"
We had a discussion a thousand years ago here about women in supervisory roles, and something that got raised was that maybe polite indirectness meant that male subordinates genuinely didn't understand them. Which was absolute nonsense: while it's not theoretically impossible to be so politely indirect that you're incomprehensible, the sort of thing that was specifically under discussion would be perfectly clear to any native speaker of English. Things like instead of saying "This sucks, fix it", saying "I think this draft could use some more polish; why don't you work on it some more and show it to me again when you've done that." Both of those are equally comprehensible as meaning "This work product is not currently acceptable", and if you've got a subordinate who responds to the first but not the second, the problem is not that they don't understand you.
Conversational self-abnegation, however right it feels when you are (I am) depressed, does put a burden on others.
It is not uncommon for some of the lawyers at my firm (particularly, but not exclusively, the more senior ones) to start e-mails with "Friends," which strikes me as a bit presumptuous.
He's only addressing the Quakers at the firm?
I just think that if you actually think there is an actual aberration and inconvenience, it's thoughtful to thank the other person for their accommodation rather than do the rote self-denigration. If there was no actual transgression, then the apology perhaps served these other social feminist functions. But in the examples at the other link, the thankee had been doing something kind.
"The patriarchy hurts men too, but you deserve the pain because this draft is shit."
I've had some weird responses here in the mid-West to my Canadian habit of apologizing. Like I've had to tell people I'm not actually sorry for something (being in their way, not being ready to order) because they've told me not to apologize. Two polite cultures coming to a culture clash!
Also we can all agree that "Best," is the worst way to sign off on an email.
My new co-worker under-apologizes and signs off with best so guess how that's going.
Anyway, that comic is exactly 'conversational self-abnegation' and doesn't really have anything to do with saying sorry to much.
My silly college "society of arts and letters" addressed members as "drones".
Like I've had to tell people I'm not actually sorry for something (being in their way, not being ready to order) because they've told me not to apologize.
Seriously, I think this is them being jerks.
70: Well they were doing that polite 'Oh! No need to apologize!' so I'm probably more of a jerk ('That wasn't really a real apology. Just words that sometimes come out of my mouth when I'm not thinking')
What's a good workplace alternative to "best"? I guess "sincerely"?
What's wrong with "Best"? I usually use "Thanks" (even when that makes no sense), but "Best" seems fine.
38: Almost all the time. I just replace them in translations with [Standard opening sentence].
For foreigners who don't read Japanese well but have to cope with the sheaf of letters brought home by their children from kindergarten or school almost every day, the trick is to look for the paragraph startingさて。 What comes next is the vital information; anything above it is seasonal verbiage that can safely be ignored.
When your "best" isn't good enough, you've got problems.
I don't have a broad sample of Japanese people I've dealt with. Just one. But she seems very apologize-y.
Minor change of subject (before I reach lifetime commenting quota this week, apparently).
While at a restaurant next to what I hope was an awkward date and not an awkward ongoing relationship, I was considering the relationship between "drama" and manners. Can what we think of as "drama," that set of socially undesirable behaviors, be corrected by etiquette? Can you apply rules? Or is it always so amorphous and emergent that "I know it when I see it" is the only guide, and people just have to figure out intuitively how to avoid it, most often by being uniformly calm, rational, and stoic?
Any discussion will be plagiarized for my upcoming work, "A Theory of Modern Drama."
I sign off with "Sorry, Heebie".
I like the cartoon (which is all over Liber Facierum). You can quibble about the details, but I think it makes a good point in general, ans as an inveterate over-apologiser I'm trying to take it on board. I'd show it to Mrs y as well, but she'd go into an apologetic melt down.
Work email sign off is a minefield. I used to do "Thanks" if I was asking for something, otherwise "Cheers" to people I knew and "Regards" to people I didn't, at least first out. If the email turned into the sort of dialogue that would have been better on IM or even the phone, I stopped signing off at all as soon as that became apparent.
"Here's Poop In Your Eye, R. Tigre"
It's the eye of R. Tigre
It's the poop of the fight.
This seems totally off. Depressed people may do this stuff, but I do it a lot, just being female. When I played soccer, I would apologize constantly. Not that I should have been thanking anybody either, but there's a lot of knee-jerk apologies. If you actually have a sentiment under the knee-jerk apology, maybe just thank the other person instead.
I'm a chronic apologiser too, but only the first of those strips resonated at all. They're almost all presented as self-loathing apologies. Not "I fucked up", or "I was thoughtless", but "I'm a bad person".
Apologizing in largely unnecessary, or even totally unnecessary occasions isn't always a bad idea.
Part of the problem is the mix of things "sorry" can mean. It's really irritating when someone tells you something difficult that happened to them, and you say "I'm sorry" and they say "well it's not YOUR fault." I know that, jackass! I'm expressing sympathy ANYWAY!
However, it is nice to be apologized to for things that are actually someone's fault or responsibility. Like being late. But it is also nice to be thanked for things, like waiting or listening or whatever.
Heebie, would you please apologize for posting an imperfect cartoon, and then thank us all for commenting on it?
and they say "well it's not YOUR fault."
I do this (and have had this done to me) sometimes, though not with the recriminatory attitude that the capitalization of "YOUR" suggests, I hope. I think it's a pretty inoffensive response?
77: My mother yells at my Japanese sister-in-law for always apologizing. Over the year it's turned into a joke -- SIL will say,"Sorry!" then catch herself -- ,"Oh, I said it! I'm sorry!"
77, 88: That's partly because Japanese often uses "sorry" to express both gratitude and obligation simultaneously. Any time another person goes to some trouble for you, you thank them by saying sumimasen, I'm sorry. I drop something and you pick it up - I'm sorry! You give my child a sweet in the playground - I'm sorry! It's almost the exact opposite of the cartoon in the OP.
Back in my day, when people wanted to be polite they would begin their emails with "What Up, Dog?" But now it's all "Hi," or "Hey." The decline of civility will be the death of this country.
I love saying, "What up?" but I feel like it's an inside joke of n=1 so I usually just think it.
People apologize to me and then be both laugh because Starkist.
Once again, my phone was too embarrassed to admit the comment was mine. SORRY.