I just had to apologize to two reades for making a bad mistake here. I will not refer to it because it is better for them if it is ignored.

I said, “What can you say when you do something inexcusable?” Then I corrected the error and apologized, which is all I could do.

But this brings up a situation that I have lerarned to deal with: The Old Southern attitude toward an apology is entirely different from that of people I come in contact with.

When I express sincere regrets, the reaction today comes in two forms. One is the person who takes apologies seriously. But that is the person who NEVER apologies. For him, an apology is like crwling on the floor. They will tell you they take apologies seriously and they can show it by the fact that they have only had to apologize two or three times in their entire lives.

The other group simply does not take its eriously. If you sincerely say, “I’m sorry” they treat it as if you had said “Bless you” to somebody who sneezed.

But if you live your life as I have, as Joe says, with your head sticking up over the side of hte trench, you make a LOT of BAD mistakes. A lot of what you know and are able to speak out about comes from saying other things that got your head knocked off, and learning by painful experience which is which.

This also means, if you care about other people’s feelings, that I you have to say “I’m sorry” both SERIOUSLY and A LOT.

My father used to say that a major difference between a big man and a little man is that a big man makes big mistakes. When you make a huge mistake, you can walk around with that pie on your face and pretend nobody notices, or you wash it off and say why it was there in the first place.

The childish reaction to an apology is to use it to lecture the other person, “Well, it’s OK if you learned your lesson.” That should end by the time you are six.

Someone on Stormfront was worried he had offended me. My reply was, “I wasn’t offended, but a gentleman’s apology is ALWAYS accepted.” I come from a culture in which, if you did not accept graciously, you would be facing a large-bore pistol at dawn.

“A gentleman’s apology is ALWAYS accepted” was a matter of life and death.

The problem with dueling in the South was that, unlike duellers elsewhere, who lived as “gentlement” and had relatively little experience with firearms, duels down South were conducted between men who had been born and bred with a gun in their hand.

In other places a duel would be reported where there was a slight injury on one side or the other. In the South the death rate was appalling.

And less than a percent of the soreheads killed died in duels. The same rule pervaded our whole society: if you did something wrong, say so. If someone says he did something wrong, accept it graciously.

Down here mothers very, very carefully taught their sons how to deal with apologies and when they were honor-bound to make them. To paraphrase the country and western hit, “Mothers, don’t let your sons grow up to be soreheads.”

It was a matter of survival.

Some of our Southern manners may be genetic. Soreheads didn’t live to reproduce.

Outside the South an apology is looked upon as something nice out of a book on manners.

I was raised to give them seriously and to take them seriously.