Non-apologies and their many names

Non-apologies are a curious beast. I mean the kind of statement that purports to be an apology – e.g. for bad behaviour or hurtful remarks – but isn’t a sincere apology at all.

Linguistically and psychologically they fascinate me, even as they exasperate. So I wrote about this for Slate’s Lexicon Valley blog:

When guilty people aren’t really sorry (or are worried about the legal implications), they don’t want to make a direct, unqualified admission. This is not a definitive science: Someone might say “I’m very sorry for what I did” and not mean it, or apologize tortuously but with heartfelt intent. Nevertheless, non-apologies tend to ring conspicuously false, being variously couched in ifs, buts, hedges, deflection, qualification, self-absorption, euphemism, defensiveness, obfuscation, and the agentless passive voice (“Mistakes were made”). I’m just sorry I got called out is a common subtext.

Non-apologies also have a lot of names. I tend to use non-apology; it’s concise, transparent, well-formed and cadenced. But I’ve also used nonpology, unapology, fauxpology, pseudo-apology, and sorry not sorry. And there are others: I’ve seen about 20 so far. This is partly because there’s no standard term for them yet, and also because their content and structure vary so much.

You can pop over to Lexicon Valley to see a list, to read more about the nature of non-apologies (and gasp in horror at real-life examples), and to find out what constitutes a genuine apology. The Lexicon Valley blog is excellent, by the way. So is the podcast, but you knew that.

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[F Minus comic by Tony Carillo, via Language Log]