Sorry About That
The Language of Public Apology
Edwin L. Battistella
From Our Blog
A couple times a week, I hear someone remark 'It is what it is,' accompanied by a weary sigh. I always puzzle over the expression a little bit, thinking What else could it be?
Posted on June 4, 2017
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The child in me was excited to see 'adulting' as one of the shortlisted words for the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2016. Adulting is on the minds—and tongues—of many of my millennial-generation college students. They explain that it is about assuming adult responsibilities like managing money, showing up at a job, buying food and paying rent, getting health care, and more.
Posted on November 21, 2016
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If there were an Olympics for making an apology, swimmer Ryan Lochte wouldn't qualify. After being outed for his fake claim that he was robbed by men identifying themselves as Brazilian police officers, he took to social media for damage control. His Instragram apology on August 19 went this way
Posted on September 11, 2016
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Slogan-wise, this year's presidential campaign gives us Donald Trump's 'Make America Great Again' and Hillary Clinton's 'Stronger Together' and 'I'm with Her.' Trump's slogan is a call to bring something back from the past. Clinton's are statements of solidarity.
Posted on August 14, 2016
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I've read a lot of résumés over the years. I've read 35-page résumés from senior academics documenting every Rotary talk, guest lecture, and letter to the editor. I've read not-quite-one-page résumés from high school students giving their neighbors as references. In the process, I've come to think of résumé reading as an acquired literary taste, like flarf or fanfiction. And I've come to think of résumé writing as a unique genre with its own rhetorical nuances and conventions.
Posted on March 13, 2016
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I always see some shocked faces when I tell a classroom of college students that there is nothing wrong with beginning a sentence with the word and (or for that matter, the words but, because, or however). I encourage them to not to take my word for it but to look it up, so I refer them to Ernest Gowers' 1965 revision of Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage.
Posted on February 14, 2016
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This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Pulitzer Prize, the annual prize in journalism and letters established by the estate of Joseph Pulitzer in 1916 and run by the Columbia School of Journalism (also established by Pulitzer's estate). The first Pulitzer Prizes in reporting were given in 1917 to Herbert Bayard Swope of New York World for a series of articles titled 'Inside the German Empire' and to the New York Tribune for its editorial on the first anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania.
Posted on January 10, 2016
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It's that time of the year again. Seniors are thinking ahead about their impending futures (a job, grad school, the Peace Corps). Former students are advancing in their careers. Colleagues and co-workers are engaging in year-end reflection and considering new positions.
Posted on December 6, 2015
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Many word games'Scrabble, Words with Friends, Scribbage, Quiddler and more, involve anagrams, or unscrambling letters to make a word. This month, we take a look at how to do that unscrambling, so here is an anagram for you to solve: naitp.
Posted on November 8, 2015
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October is an important month for book festivals'in Boston, Austin, Madison, Baton Rouge, and of course Frankfurt, Germany, which hosts the world's oldest book festival. In honor of book festivals, I want to delve a bit into the way that the language of books expanded the English vocabulary.
Posted on October 11, 2015
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Students are heading back to school this month and many recent high school grads are off to college. At institutions across the country, deans are dutifully studying the Beloit College Mindset List to remind their faculty of the recent cultural experiences that have shaped the today's youth'and to remind us of how much the world has changed.
Posted on September 13, 2015
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Summer is a time when many of us have a little extra time for reading. For me, that means Go Set a Watchman, some Haruki Murukami and James Lee Burke, plus summer mysteries and thrillers. It means catching up on what local authors and friends have published. And it means reading new books in my field and writing book reviews.
Posted on August 11, 2015
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Amid Fourth of July parades and fireworks, I found myself asking this: why do we call this day 'Independence Day' rather than 'Revolution Day?' The short answer,of course, is that on 4 July, we celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a day that has been commemorated since 1777.
Posted on July 12, 2015
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Since publishing Sorry About That a year ago, I've been trying to keep track of apologies in the news. Google sends me a handful of news items every day. Some are curious ('J.K. Rowling issues apology over slain 'Harry Potter' character'), some are cute ('Blizzard 2015: Meteorologist apologizes for 'big forecast miss''), and some are sad ('An open apology to my kids on the subject of my divorce').
Posted on June 14, 2015
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It's graduation time at many of the nation's schools and colleges. The commencement ceremony is a great exhalation for all involved and an annual rite of passage celebrating academic achievements. Commencement ceremonies typically feature a visiting dignitary who offers a few thousand inspirational words. Over the years, I've heard more of these speeches than I care to admit and have made my own checklist of suggestions for speakers. For those of you giving commencement speeches or listening to them, here's my advice.
Posted on May 10, 2015
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Last month marked the hundredth anniversary of the Federal Trade Commission, the regulatory agency that looks after consumer interests by enforcing truth in advertising laws. Established by the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 and signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson, the FTC opened its doors in March 16 of 2015, taking the place of the older Bureau of Corporations.
Posted on April 12, 2015
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The lexicographers at Oxford Dictionaries keep watch on our collective neology and select a word'or words—of the year: a word that is both forward-looking and reflects the culture of the current year. From 2004 we've had chav, podcast, carbon-neutral, locavore, unfriend, refudiate, squeezed middle, the verb GIF, and selfie.
Posted on November 18, 2014
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Forty years ago, President Richard M. Nixon faced certain impeachment by the Congress for the Watergate scandal. He resigned the presidency, expressing a sort of conditional regret.
Posted on September 23, 2014
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By Edwin Battistella Oxford Dictionaries have been collecting lexicographic material and updating dictionaries for over a century now, though its Word of the Year award is still relatively recent. Only since 2004 Oxford Dictionaries have been selecting a word that captures the mood of the previous year. Thinking about the possible contenders for 2013 (twerk? fail? drone? shutdown? bitcoin?) got me to wondering about the past.
Posted on November 21, 2013
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By Edwin Battistella The annual Word of the Year selection by Oxford Dictionaries and others inspired me to an odd personal challenge last year. In November of 2011, about the time that Oxford Dictionaries were settling on squeezed middle as both the UK and US word of the year, I made a New Year's Resolution for 2012.
Posted on November 19, 2013
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