Public service announcement

[tim]

Dear world:

Please stop using the phrase "I'm sorry if I offended you."

If I'm calling you on your bullshit, your error wasn't to hurt my feelings. If I were actually hurt, I probably wouldn't have the energy to confront you about it, unless you were someone I knew well.

Rather, your error was to say something that made you look like an ignorant clown.

So why are you apologizing to me for that?

Love,
tim

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Another way of saying it (in re discussion in comments here) is that there is something to learn from any criticism. If "Alice" thinks something you said makes you seem like an ignorant clown, then there's probably something in either what you said, or how you said it, or both, that's worth examining. Unless, that is, you have no respect for "Alice" whatsoever. If "I'm sorry if I offended you" connotes "I have no respect for you whatsoever", is it really a polite thing to say?

Comments

[tim]

I figure if I say something that I believe is right and someone else finds it (rather than the way I have chosen to phrase it, which would be occasion for me to learn how to better express what I mean, rather than for me to scold them for being offended) offensive, that's their shit and they need to own it. If it's a friend, I might not bring up the issue in the future; if it's a stranger, I would find it as bizarre to be concerned about what they felt as it would be for them to be concerned about how whatever I ate for lunch today agreed with me.

[stolen_tea]

I take it that there is a line that would be crossed, if "offensive" were replaced by "racist" (or perhaps even merely "hurtful"), such that you would start caring what they felt? (Changing "offended" to whatever appropriate.)

Or alternatively, it also seems quite possible that I am missing something vital in your usage of "felt".

(Generally, myself, I tend to agree that if someone feels hurt at something I said, that it's "their shit and they need to own it". But I also think it's bad to cause people to feel hurt, even if they're doing it to themselves, because so many of us are. I'm often willing to put effort into avoiding causing people to feel hurt, and apologize if I did. How much effort is based on a bunch of different factors that I haven't analyzed in detail, but which produces results that I've so far considered acceptable.)