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Pardon my sorry

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Not One-Off Britishisms is a blog that covers the rise of words and phrases normally found in British English over here in North America. They put up a post recently about the frequency of people in NA saying “sorry?” when they’re asking someone to repeat themselves:

Bones: Miss Moore, is there anything you wish to say at this stage?

Dotty (in the sense of “Pardon?”): Sorry?

Bones: My dear, we are all sorry

“Sorry?” is my personal favourite in those situations, although I’d never understood it to be a primarily British thing. After giving it some consideration, however, it did occur to me that most of my friends who’ve grown up in North America (rather than Europe) tend to say “Pardon Me” rather than “Sorry”. I first learned English in Germany, and I’m sure that lends itself to a certain amount of quirks.

I went looking for further corroboration about the regional differences in “Sorry” vs. “Pardon me”, and while I didn’t find anything about that specific phenomenon, I did come across this interesting distinction between “Pardon me” and “Excuse me”, posited by a forum poster on the excellent WordReference forums:

The difference is a temporal in nature. There is a marked distinction between an excuse and a pardon. You say “excuse me” for something you are about to do and “pardon me” for something you have already done. In common usage they are often used interchangably [sic] but that is technically incorrect.

I’d never thought about it like that before, but it makes total sense, doesn’t it? Although as J says: “What kind of twisted-up nabob do you have to be to think about stuff that much?”

Answer: my kind of twisted-up nabob.


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