Responding to an empathetic "I'm sorry"

An interaction I had with a coworker last week reminded me of an awkward moment I've been in before:

Coworker - Ugh, I'm not getting anything done today. I'm starting to feel really
sick.
Me - Oh, that sucks. I'm sorry.
Coworker - That's okay.

Suddenly, all those times when I had to produce a response to an empathetic I'm sorry came flooding back to me. How is one supposed to respond when someone says I'm sorry empathetically, and not as a true apology?

I'm sorry may be the quintessential apology phrase, but in cases like the one above, it really doesn't act as a true apology. As Robin Lakoff says in The Language Wars, in an apology, "the maker (1) acknowledges wrongdoing; (2) acknowledges that the addressee is the wronged party; (3) admits needing something (forgiveness) from the addressee to make things right again." The apologizer thus loses status by apologizing. An apologizee can use a response like It's okay to grant forgiveness or minimize the severity of the offense. Such a statement restores the balance of status between the two speakers.

When I said I'm sorry to my coworker, I did not mean any of the things that Lakoff associates with apology. I was showing empathy. I was sorry - in the sense of regretful - that my coworker was not feeling well. However, as Deborah Tannen notes in Talking from 9 to 5, some people (especially men, she says) tend to take all apologies as true apologies such that even an empathetic apology can make the apologizer lose status in the eyes of the apologizee. Perhaps my coworker took my apology literally and felt that I had weakened myself; her That's okay could have been a way for her to restore balance between us.

I've observed this phenomenon in a more extreme form when someone responds to an empathetic apology with It's not your fault. This can come off as rude, however, because the apologizee is confirming that the apologizer has accepted blame (which was not the apologizer's attention - he/she was simply showing empathy) AND the apologizee is implying stupidity on the part of the apologizer (as in, Why are you apologizing when you obviously had nothing to do with me getting sick?).

That's okay is much milder than this because my coworker was not explicitly acknowledging that I was accepting blame for her sickness (which I wasn't). I got the impression that she simply didn't know what else to say - I know that I have felt that way when someone has given me an empathetic I'm sorry. I can't think of a standard response to an empathetic I'm sorry, whereas an apologetic I'm sorry forms somewhat of an adjacency pair with phrases like That's okay. If I had been in my coworker's position, my thought process would have been something like this: Um, wait, it's not his fault that I'm sick. But it was nice of him to show he cares, so I have to acknowledge that. So what do I say? I guess I just have to say what I usually say when someone says they're sorry. So she pulled out the forgiveness-granting That's okay, even though there was nothing to forgive me for.

Having been in my coworker's position before, I have looked for other less awkward responses to an empathetic I'm sorry. I've tried Thanks, but that still feels wrong - it sounds like I am thanking my interlocutor for taking some of the blame, even though I'm just thanking them for showing they care. Instead, I'll say something like It could be worse or Well, at least I feel better than I did yesterday. At least that way, I figure, I'm downplaying my suffering and quickly changing the topic away from whatever my interlocutor said. An easy escape, no?

Someday I'll get these ads

For the past couple of years, I have been captivated by Wells Fargo’s bizarre series of ads that show people holding up signs. The bearer generally comments on his/her financial future in relation to the surrounding scene, often ironically. Below, for instance, the supposed irony behind the sign-bearer's message is "Right now, I'm making things that celebrate other people's achievements. I’m not achieving anything myself by doing this, but some day, I will!"


My cousin owns a trophy business - let's say she somehow had the same sentiment as this fellow. Would I ever expect to walk into her store one day and see her holding up this sign? Probably not.

What is the deal with these ads? What a strange and unnatural way for an advertiser to make a character “speak” to us! What happened to speech bubbles or putting the quote somewhere else in the ad? I got to thinking about situations where we WOULDN’T be surprised to see someone using a sign to communicate, and this helped me get to the bottom of what weirds me out so much about these ads.

Let’s look at another one:


Where are these hands coming from? Imagine the body they would be attached to. The position of the hands and the sign indicate that this person is holding the sign like a fast food tray, with the text facing him/her. So, Wells Fargo, are you telling me someone really wrote this sign to him/herself and is looking down at it, pondering its "funny" message?

And one more:


OK, so we have husband and wife, wife with hand on tummy, the contents of which are about to "expand" this family. And they're going to expand their house, too, some day! My sister-in-law is expanding her house and just expanded her family with a second baby, but she sure didn't tell us about it by standing with her partner and holding a sign.

I’ve never seen someone convey these kinds of sentiments in sign form. So, when IS it common for us to see people holding up word-containing signs? Here are the reasons and contexts that come to mind, each followed by a consideration of what the people in the Wells Fargo ads might be doing.

1. Inability (biological or situational) to communicate verbally - A person who is unable to speak holds up a piece of paper on which they have written a message. A hitchhiker holds up a "CALIFORNIA OR BUST" sign - he can speak, but he cannot stop every car and ask for a ride verbally. A lady standing next to a TV camera tells David Letterman what to say because the two cannot talk simultaneously on camera.

• So are our friends in the ads communicating out of necessity because they cannot speak? Not likely - I don't think I've ever seen a person in a Wells Fargo ad who was differently abled, and I would bet that they would create an ad of a person in a wheelchair before they launched an entire campaign directed at people who are unable to speak. No other signs of a situational inability to speak are detectable in these images.

2. Avoidance of verbal repetition - A man sitting on the sidewalk holds a cardboard sign with a handwritten request for spare change. A chauffeur at the airport holds up a sign saying "A. Bradford" because it is not OK for him to ask every single person walking out of the terminal if he is A. Bradford.

• Are these people tired of telling their friends these little tidbits of financial news? Is the happy couple sick and tired of telling people about their future home and family expansion? Are they standing at their front door holding this sign so anyone who happens to walk by will be sure to know this news? Seems unlikely.

3. Increased visibility of message - A protester carries a sign on a stick to increase the chance that her message will be received. A man in a parka rocks an arrow-shaped sign back and forth, pointing to a new housing development (although one could also argue that the man is part of the sign in this case).

• Are the ad characters trying to make their message more visible? Well, it seems a little silly that these people would go to such lengths to get these trifling messages out to the whole world. I mean, how many people really care that this couple is expanding their home and their family? And I doubt Mr. Trophy wants to make it known to his whole clientele that he feels like he isn’t achieving anything right now.

4. Message enhancement - Instead of simply chanting out loud "End the War," a protester carries a sign with non-linguistic symbols such as bombs and drops of blood. A scantily clad woman walks across the scene of a boxing match with a sign saying "Round 2" because it's so much more fun than having some guy say it over a microphone. When my aunt arrived home from a trip to Botswana when I was 8, we waited for her at the airport with a big poster saying "WELCOME HOME" because it made her return seem bigger than our own voices could.

• Well, this is the only place I see a tie-in with these ads. How are these messages enhanced by the fact that they are written on signs? I don't see any non-linguistics symbols that make the message more exciting. But, like my aunt's "WELCOME HOME" sign, the sign seems to magnify the importance of the statement.

This is what strikes me as so odd about these ads. The signs in them only minimally serve any of the functions that the human+sign combination typically does. They serve only to magnify a message that is really quite trifling!

Design-wise, however, this technique makes both the person and the text central to the ad, and avoids the need for a (possibly juvenile-looking) speech bubble or the awkwardness of laying text over the image. The sign-holding solution gets around this, I feel, but makes the ad look weird and unnatural as a result.

I admit I am simplifying some things here, including the distinction between a person out in the real world holding a sign, and a picture of a person posing with a sign. These are quite different; I’m interpreting the ads as the former and not the latter. This distinction may be the topic of a later post. I’m also pretending that the camera really has caught these sign bearers candidly (as we're meant to assume) and that they aren’t just hired models.

Any other ideas why Wells Fargo would employ this technique to reel in customers? Do these ads strike anyone else as awkward? Any other reasons why one might choose to communicate through words on a sign?

I’ll keep thinking about it. In the mean time, I’m going to go stand in Union Square with a sign that says “Someday, I will understand Wells Fargo’s advertising campaign.”

It’s OFFICIAL: The Glottal Stop Has Started Vocalizing!

So I want to start off this blog on the right foot, but, I’ve wondered, what really is the RIGHT way to start a blog? Do I have some kind of grand opening celebration? Do I have some kind of virtual ribbon cutting?

Then I hearkened back to a Christmas letter I received in which I was struck by the use of the word “official.” Here is what that part of the letter said:

I never knew there was a point when one officially turned 5 1/2! But hey, if my friend is announcing the officialness of an official event, why can’t I?

I AM PROUD TO ANNOUNCE THAT THE GLOTTAL STOP IS OFFICIALLY OPEN!

YES! There we go - the answer to my how-to-start-my-blog question!

How interesting, though, that my friend used this word in reference to an event that I would never imagine would qualify for “official”-worthy status. Why was she saying this?

I think my friend's use of the word comes closest to this entry in the OED: "4.a. Derived from, or having the sanction of, persons in office; authorized or supported by a government, organization, etc.; hence (more widely) authoritative; formally accepted or agreed." But my friend is using this in a slightly different way - her use means something more like “truly” or “strictly speaking." Perhaps she has been telling people for the past few months that her son is 5 1/2, but now he truly has passed the date on the calendar that is exactly six months from his fifth birthday, so it’s “official.” This could give the impression that my friend generally fudges facts unless she qualifies them with an "official" declaration indicating that she is speaking with precision. A similar phenomenon is when people preface a statement with, "To tell you the truth," or, "To be honest with you," as Tim at Mother Tongue Annoyances notes. If you don't preface a sentence in this way, does it mean you aren't telling the truth? Is there a term for such qualifications that make speaking the truth a marked rather than an unmarked way of speaking?

It could have been, however, that my friend was looking for a word that would make her son’s five-and-a-half-ness seem a bigger deal. She could have just said, “___ has grown quite a bit in the past year and is now 5 1/2,” but that doesn't sound incredibly exciting. By framing the statement as an “announcement” and making her son’s age something “official”-worthy, she steps out of her Christmas-letter-writing voice and makes the statement into something that seems to carry more weight.

During the week in which I was mulling this over, another use of “official” appeared to me. At a wedding shop, I saw this T-shirt:


It’s a little hard to see in this picture, but it says “OFFICIAL RING BEARER” in a police-esque logo. The back says “RING SECURITY.” That made me think, isn’t it enough of an honor for a boy to be a ring bearer? Does such a T-shirt somehow help the chap (or his parents) to feel more important if it is made to seem that the wedding couple has selected him not as his friends or relatives, but as authorities holding some sort of office? Is there some sort of ring insecurity here?

A Google search of other uses of official shows that officialness is everywhere! Here are some more examples:

I think each of these could be analyzed in a way similar to how I looked at my friend’s letter and the ring bearer shirt, so I won’t talk about each individually. But how interesting that they all use the word “official” or “officially” to impart a sense of power.

So anyway, wow, I feel enlightened and empowered now - anything can be official! So instead of just officially declaring The Glottal Stop to be open, I declare the official food of The Glottal Stop to be borscht, the official drink of The Glottal Stop to be mango juice, and the official bird of The Glottal Stop to be the cockatoo!