Sorry
By DAN LANGFORD
Even worse than last week’s topic of common and tacky was, and is, ’sorry.’ I’m not talking about ’sorry’ as it’s used when making apology or feeling remorse. All of us probably need more of that, and that’s not the usage of which I speak.
“He’s just sorry as gulley dirt,” I can hear my folks saying about a particularly disreputable character in our hometown whose actions and appearance went way past common and tacky. Common and tacky can be redeemed, probably. I’m not so sure about sorry, for I was raised to think its almost genetic.
That doesn’t mean my parents and others didn’t warn us against being sorry. “Son, only sorry folks do (or don’t do, as the case might have been) that,” I can hear both my parents saying. “That’s just plain sorry.” We learned it early and we learned it well, and I’ll bet there’s not a Southerner on the face of the earth who doesn’t know what it means.