(no subject)

[jack]

For ages, teenagers/young adults in Arbury have been yelling at me for being bald[1]. Today an old lady I said Good Morning to said she liked my hair. I don't know what she liked, if anything at all, but it was very sweet.

[1] Indeed, my notion of different levels of apology apply here to. If I, or someone, is unconventionally dressed, or badly dressed, or ugly, or fat, or bald, or has a regional or class accent, or is foreign, and someone is offended by this, you don't feel to have (1) deliberately offended them, but you may feel to have (2) inconsiderately or (3) inadvertently offended them -- the way you might if you had bad table manners, or a bad small, or similar. Whereas in fact, not even (4) a regret devoid of causation is appropriate, you can drop the response as far as (5) a sarcastic "I'm sorry you're so stupid..."

Comments

[fishpi.livejournal.com]

I've known you for a long time now, and got somewhat used to your manner of speaking. But I *still* can't make head or tail of that second paragraph, even on the third attempt.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

It's not a paragraph, it's a footnote. That's not the best defence, is it?

Thanks for speaking up, it probably came out incomprehensible, as it often does when I'm thinking faster that I write.

You need to know my theory about levels of apology. If I hold a party here when someone is living abroad then I say "sorry you'll miss out", meaning, of the three branches of apology (a) regretting, (b) without culpability but (c) that I did in fact cause their missing out, even though unavoidably. "Sorry I spilled your drink" probably means you were careless, but couldn't reasonably have prevented it. "Sorry for isnulting you" should mean you actually shouldn't have done it. But "sorry your mother died" doesn't accept any causation.

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

I think that to in sentence one is too and the next two tos are yous, or possibly Is, unless the I is a you too.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

That's about right. "to/too" is a typo -- sorry! "feel you have" would probably be a lot clearer, yes, but I think "feel to have" is a normal construction? And, indeed, I do blur between "you (one)" and "I"

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Livredor: You said you understand me. I don't want to ask you to follow me around explaining my exploding un-follow-able thoughts with well written paragraph-ful posts. But, you know, it would help if you did :)

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

Can I have a go:

cartesiandaemon identifies different categories of sorry-ness -
i: expression of sorrow for a situation,
ii: expression of regret for an inadvertent action of his,
iii: expression of culpability for a deliberate misjudgement, and so on.

If someone is offended by his looks, he might well be sorry (type I) - ie sad that they are disgusted by his horribly deformed physiognomy, possibly sorry(type II), but not sorry (III).

[ I (pseudomonas) prefer to disambiguate by referring to sorry-sympathetic and sorry-apologetic. See this Language Log post for some tangentially-related observations.]