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

---

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

[hitchhiker]

"internalised", if you dislike "codified". it's like grammar, you pick it up by interacting with people.

[tim]

you pick it up by interacting with people.

Apparently I didn't.

[juli]

Then "conventions" are going to vary a lot. I've spent some time in pathologically-confrontational circles and pathologically-avoidant cultures. Also some passive-aggressive. I'd like to imagine that few people's experiences lead them down a single uniform path of people who think and act just like them, but I know better. And of the conflict-avoidant people I know, many of them aggressively avoid any other style and as a community shun people who raise genuine grievances. See also: how geek social fallacies have influenced geek poly communities and their fetish for rationality and "communication".