A Gesture for Apologizing to Other Drivers?

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. We’re still hearing responses to the jogger who was on our show, who wanted a word to say when he’s coming up behind somebody so that he doesn’t startle them.

And I think the most popular suggestion turned out to be just to say, on your left or on your right.

But we also heard from Victoria Wolf in Sacramento, California, who said that conversation brought up another question that’s been bugging her.

Say you’re driving a car and you make a mistake and you know it’s your mistake. You pulled out in front of somebody when you shouldn’t have. How do you signal to them, oops, my bad?

Oh, I know what I do. I mouth the word sorry in exaggerated facial expressions. I get as close to the windshield as I can so they can really see my face. And I don’t know if it works, but it makes me feel better.

Well, yeah, I was going to say I struggled with this myself because I feel like if I stuck my face close to the window and said, sorry, they might think I’m saying something nasty to them. I mean, I know that I’ve done these things where I’ve been waving my arms like, oops, it’s my bad. I’m pointing to myself, but I’m sure it just looks like somebody who’s furious.

And so I’m thinking, how do we say, oops, my mistake? And all I could think of, Grant, was that I looked up the sign in American sign language for sorry, the word sorry. And you form a fist in your hand and you rotate it on your chest using a couple of clockwise motions. I don’t know that that would work. I don’t know that the people are going to see that. But I hope that somebody has a good idea for us because I think this would be one small step for civility in our culture.

Yeah, because we have some of these other hand signals that are clear, like the little how you do in hand flap, whether your hand’s on the steering wheel where you only lift up the fingers. The hand flap. And we’ve got the little you go ahead hand motion, you know, and it’s not clear whose turn it is or there’s a pedestrian waiting to cross. So some of this stuff is very clear.

But you’re right. This is a gap. This is not a lexical gap. This is a gesture gap. I would love to know what people suggest for us.

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