Wednesday 11 February 2009

Sorry?

Yesterday's unedifying show trial of four 'leading bankers' proved once again that Sorry is actually the easiest word to say. This is because it has a double meaning, expressing either remorse/repentance for one's actions, or regret at the way things turned out. Clearly the bankers were using it in its second sense. We could do with a new word that is less weasely.
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2 comments:

  1. malty11 February 2009 at 21:02

    Leonard Cheshire, an honourable and Christian man as ever was told a good story about the use of contritionlite.
    At the end of the Pacific war he seems to have been involved in the aftermath of the Japanese surrender, he had, I think been an observer at the dropping of the atomic bombs.
    Bear in mind he never really had a bad word to say about anyone.
    He thought that there was something totally false and distastefull about the way the Japanese threw down their weapons and shouted, "now teach us to be Christians"
    I watched all of yesterdays sorry spectacle and came away with a nasty taste in mouth.
    Television often confronts us with the seamer side but these four individuals were some of the nastiest to date, not an ounce of genuine remorse among them The Scottish pair would have been enjoying a good joke about their experience as they wound their way home.
    May they and their ilk rot in hell

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  2. mahlerman12 February 2009 at 10:43

    So deep is the loathing that these four, and hundreds of their kind beget, that it is doubtful whether any existing words they had uttered, nor any new locution we could conjure, would fit the bill. They just needed to get through that morning grilling, and like everything else in their now-gilded lives, their responses to weak questioning was managed with a grim skill that would have been welcome much earlier, in their elevated professional existence, perhaps saving us (the people left when bankers are taken out of the equation) from the pain now before us, and looming.
    Difficult to admit it, but what we are really seeking, in a sense that the mob needs to see some pain, is a tangible expression of their collective guilt.
    There have been one or two suicides, and some of the crazier websites are already edging toward the revenge culture of 'I know where you live' etc
    Words don't cut it any more - we need to see a few of them roasting on a spit.

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