My bad.
When I first came to L.A., I was struck by how many people would say “my bad” instead of “excuse me” or “I’m sorry” or “oops”. I confess, I’ve never liked it.
It seems too blithe, too easy, too short. It’s almost flippant to hear adults using a phrase that sounds so infantile. The word “bad” is so basic, it’s one of the first words babies learn. Even dogs understand a stern “Baaaad!!” It’s on the Swadesh word list, for Pete’s sake. It has even less distinctiveness than “nice”, as in “Oh, that’s nice, dear.”
There’s also an observable lack of actual apology or regret attached to the phrase. It really does not mean “I feel bad about this, I should not have done it, I am sorry”. It just means, “Yeah, I screwed up”. It’s acknowledgment, and little else.
“My bad” is no more attractive coming from children than it is from adults. My students use it constantly. You didn’t do your homework? “My bad”. You lost your pen? “My bad”. You were swinging your padlock around on the knotted end of your gym shirt and you whacked Min Sun on the face with it, and now she’s bleeding and crying in the nurse’s office? “My bad”.
There’s a real lack of any sense of perspective when you can use the same phrase to excuse ‘lost-my-pencil’ as you use to excuse ‘incapacitated-the-best-student-in-the-class’.
I am about ready to start snarling at anyone who says “my bad”. I will be glad when it becomes uncool, probably somewhere around November of 2009. I only hope nothing even more flippant replaces it. I can just imagine someone slamming into my car at that evil intersection at Hillhurst and Sunset before shrugging and offering, by way of apology, “Yep, that was me”.
