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Karina Schumann, a psychologist, recently moved to California for graduate studies at Stanford as an expert in, among other things, the use and abuse of “sorry.”

At the University of Waterloo, she had discovered men have a higher moral threshold for offensive behaviour than women, and so they apologize less frequently, and rarely for the little things.

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Far from her stereotypically polite native land, in a stereotypically self-absorbed country, she saw this “threshold mechanism” at play once again, only not on the spectrum of gender, but of national culture.

Once you learn how to properly say ‘I’m sorry,’ you will no longer be trying to become Canadian, you will have rewired your brain to such a degree that you will actually be Canadian

Saying “sorry,” she realized, is not always an apology. It is also a “politeness strategy — a way to have smooth, norm-abiding, harmonious interactions.”

This is the casually well-mannered reflexive northern “sorry” — not apologetic, not quite obsequious, but definitely submissive — and it is as dear to Canadians as beer, snow and hockey.