I'M NOT INCLINED to say "excuse me" all that often. It's not that I'm rude, it's just that I'm Irish, and we prefer the more demeaning alternative of "sorry". We love apologising, even when we've done nothing wrong.
Of course "sorry" is just a colloquial equivalent to "excuse me". We don't literally mean we're sorry when we're not, and as such it works fine, as long as everyone is on message. Only when you encounter people who use "excuse me" when they mean "excuse me", do you realise the full implication of the word. Like Londoners.
Last Saturday, I was continuing my fruitless hunt for a particular book of essays by the late, supernaturally talented David Foster Wallace in Waterstones. This branch, like all the others I had tried, had nothing on the shelves and I was making my way to the exit (and appreciating the irony of how, since his tragic suicide, all the work of a writer criminally under-rated in his lifetime was now sold out), when a hulking shape filled the door frame.
Egress? Blocked. Beyond, I could make out drizzle. The man was sheltering, to be fair, but he was standing smack bang in the doorway on a Saturday afternoon. I might have had a shot at passing if he were smaller (say a quarter the size) but the man was immense. There was no way to squeeze past without him sensing a flesh- dwelling parasite on his flank and twatting me with a scratching paw. It was absurd. I tapped him on the shoulder and he turned around. I looked at him and gestured helplessly, illustrating some of the dimensions involved in my dilemma, with flapping hands. "Sorry. Can I just . . . "
It was delivered with what I hoped was a decent serving of sarcasm. He would surely understand that I was in no way apologising for my part in this farce. He would instinctively "get" the implied measure of blame that I was ladling out for him with my devastating, embittered smile. And here's what kills me. He smiled back, stood aside, humoured by my cap-in-hand humility, and gave me the Walter Raleigh sweep-of-the-arm. "Don't be sorry mate, I'm the one that's in your way. (And then, chuckling), you've got every right to leave the shop." As I walked past, I tried to put a finger on why I was overcome with rage. It was as if this stranger had patted me on the head.
In Germany, they call it "treppenwitz" - on-the-stairs humour. In France, it's "l'ésprit d'escalier" - the spirit of the stairs. Both refer to the art of the imaginary comeback that you can only summon long after the moment for such quips has passed. I guess the reference to stairs comes from the fact that continental Europeans are much happier living in apartment blocks, and that there, you leave dinner parties - and imagine witty comebacks - on stairwells. In Ireland, we drive everywhere and we do our thinking outside houses, for the most part. Here, we have at-the-car-door wit, or taxi-zing.
What I came up with outside the bookshop was neither humorous nor strictly speaking a comeback, since I wanted to go back in time and say it again at the beginning of the conversation and not the end. All I wanted to do was go back and replace "sorry" with "excuse me".
Clearly, it's about power, perceived and real. I was angry because by saying "sorry" despite not meaning it, I was submitting in some tiny way. And by agonising over all this in the first place, I am displaying some larger, less curable insecurity about my place in the world.
It happened again this morning. In the coffee shop, a woman backed into me without looking and stood on my toe. "Sorry," I yelped, jumping back and holding one foot in the air. She looked at me with a half-smile and replied, "That's okay, honey". On the pain scale of one to 10, what had occurred in my foot was at least a five, and she got the opportunity to forgive me. She was well within her rights. After all, I had asked for it.
Our obsession with this useless, bogus whimper, this literal excuse for a word, is a sorry state of affairs. How has it become our favourite mode of expression? Our ancestors didn't say, "tá brón orm" when they were squeezing out the door of Waterstones. They said "gabh mo leithscéal".
You hear sorry 30 times a day, and never once intended as an apology. "You dropped your scarf back there" is "Sorry, you dropped your scarf back there". But why are you sorry to be giving them good information? It's not like you wrung the scarf from their neck and flung it behind you.
Maybe it reflects a greater insecurity from the past, an old habit dying hard. But in its current form, it is the very zenith of passive-aggression, because we really don't mean it - I don't, at least. I'm not remotely sorry, so I'm weaning myself off "sorry". Walking down the escalators in the Tube station, there is a very clear rule of stand-to-the-right so commuters can run down on the left. I had a bag on my shoulder as I raced down the left-hand side yesterday. As I went, I felt a jolt to the bag. I had clearly snagged it on someone's shoulder or arm. It wasn't their fault, but it wasn't mine either. Remembering my training, I spun around to find a schoolboy of about 10 years of age, his glasses knocked crooked across his nose, and a red mark on his cheekbone. I went for it.
"Excuuusee me."
With this mysterious elongation, it came out all wrong, tinged with high dudgeon and a little bit crazy like Kenneth Williams, or a character from a Little Britain sketch.
"I mean, sorry. Pardon me."
It takes practice, this excusing of oneself. At least, I hadn't doffed my cap.