A friend apologised to me in March for something that had happened in January, and the apology contained the phrases I hear you, that's on me, and I'm working on it. It was sincere. I have known her for nineteen years and I do not doubt a word of it. I also noticed, while she was speaking, that I had nothing to say back, and it took me until about June to work out why.
Every one of those phrases is designed to end a conversation.
That is not an accusation about her. She had reached for the only apology vocabulary currently in circulation, which is the vocabulary of the public apology — the statement issued by an institution, or by a person with a following, when something has surfaced. It is a genre with a very specific job: absorb the objection, concede the point, and stop the story. It has to be quotable, it has to leave nothing for a follow-up question, and it must under no circumstances open a topic.
Those constraints have produced a formidable piece of language. I hear you concedes that you were heard while committing to nothing about what was heard. That's on me accepts responsibility so completely and so quickly that there is no remaining allocation to argue about. I'm working on it moves the whole matter into a future the speaker will report on at their discretion. Together they perform contrition and close the door, in about eleven words, and there is no reply that is not either graciousness or an attack.
In a press statement that is exactly right. In a kitchen it is a disaster.
Because what a private apology is for is the opposite. It is the beginning of the conversation, not the end. The person apologising does not actually know yet what they did — they know the outline, they have inferred the rest — and the whole value of the exchange is the part where the other person says, no, it wasn't that, it was the thing you said afterwards. That exchange requires an apology with a loose end in it. Something unfinished, something wrong enough to be corrected.
The concession I owe here is real and I have made it against myself twice while writing this. The apology that this vocabulary replaced was frequently much worse. It was defensive, or it was conditional — I'm sorry you felt that way — or, most often, it did not happen at all, and a marriage or a friendship simply absorbed the thing and carried it for thirty years. The new language at least names the harm and does not argue with the person about whether they experienced it. Anyone who has been on the receiving end of the old kind will take the new kind, and they are right to.
So let me put the claim more narrowly, because the vocabulary is not the problem. What the borrowed phrases import is the audience.
A public apology is spoken to a third party. It is addressed to the person harmed and performed for everyone watching, and its success is judged by that gallery. Bring that structure into a room with two people in it and something strange happens: the apologiser is still, faintly, performing, and the apologised-to becomes an audience rather than a participant. That is why I had nothing to say. I had not been invited into a conversation. I had been shown a statement, and the only available responses were the ones an audience has, which are applause or booing.
You can hear where the audience is in the grammar. I'm working on it has no listener in it. Compare: I don't know why I did that, and I have been going over it. Same content, roughly, but the second one is addressed to somebody, and it hands over something the other person can pick up.
I told her some of this in June, badly, and she was much better about it than I would have been. She said she had rehearsed the March conversation in the car, which I already knew, because everybody rehearses, and then she said the thing that I have kept: that she had rehearsed it in the voice of someone who might be overheard, because that was the only version she could get through without crying.
Which is a good reason. It is a reason I have used. And it means the phrases are not a symptom of a colder culture but a piece of protective equipment that we have all quietly agreed to wear indoors, and that the cost of taking it off is exactly the thing it protects against, and that I am not at all sure I would take mine off first.
