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Bootvis

ESL here. How correct is it to use ’any harm’ to mean ‘all harm’.

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1) "We apologize for any harm we might have caused"

2) "We apologize for any harm that we caused"

3) "We apologize for all the harm that we caused"

(1) is the least apologetic. This could be interpreted as saying "we might or might not have caused harm, and we think we didn't but you think we did, so we're going to apologize for your sake, but we're not really sorry because we didn't do anything wrong from our perspective".

(3) is the most apologetic. You acknowledge that you did something wrong, and that you're apologizing for it. This might be followed up with a specific list of the things that you did wrong, and that you are apologizing for. That would make for the most sincere apology. This could be interpreted as "we caused harm and we're sorry, whatever harm you think that we did, we agree that you are right, and we are sorry for all of it".

(2) is partway between (1) and (3). You acknowledge you caused harm, but you won't enumerate the things that you did wrong. So, you leave yourself a little bit of wiggle room. This could be interpreted as "we caused harm and we're sorry, but we didn't cause that much harm, we think it was actually quite little, you think it was a lot, but we're saying sorry, so let us go with this apology".

A sincere written apology should be 3. You needn’t misrepresent your own intentions to do this, but it does require thinking about the specific harms you have caused (perhaps unintentionally) and enumerating them in a way that doesn’t minimize their import. That is the anatomy of a true apology. It requires taking the other perspective as fact.

There isn’t much difference and both are really correct. The problem with ‘any’ as raised here is the ambiguity. It could be taken to mean ‘any harm, if it occurred’ or ‘any single bit of harm that did occur’. So in this sense ‘all harm’ would be safer and less ambiguous.

That depends on the sentence context.[1] As used here it is fully correct; "we sincerely apologize for all harm our research group did" would be highly anomalous, whereas the phrasing they actually used is conventional.

"We sincerely apologize for all the harm our research group did" would be a little less unnatural than "...for all harm...", but it's still an unusual choice of wording that ends up sounding like you want to emphasize that you did an unusually large amount of harm.

A more standard phrasing that includes the word all would be "We apologize for any and all harm...".

The standard form I know is actually "[I am deeply sorry] for any harm I may have caused..."; the letter here does not use a modalized verb. (Compare their "We sincerely apologize for any harm our research group did...".) In that sense it's more definite than usual. The criticism above is strange.

(The reason for the modality in the standard form isn't really to leave open the possibility that you didn't do any harm. It's to leave open the possibility that you did harm you don't even know about -- and therefore can't apologize for specifically.)

[1] In general, any occurs only in negative sentences, though in the details there are several types of sentences that are sort of "honorarily negative" for the purposes of allowing any and other words that obey the same restrictions.

How about "we apologize for the harm"?

You want my opinion? It's possible, it's less standard than the "for any harm" form, but it means roughly the same thing.

It wouldn't have occurred to me to discuss it above, because I thought I was contrasting any with all, and neither is present in that example. But I'd rate it above most of the alternatives discussed (while still below "for any harm").

Not correct, at least in this context. "Any harm" means there could be no harm, or some harm, but "all harm" admits there was harm. I.e. "any" is not an admission of doing harm, or an acceptance that it happened.

If you want to apologise, "all harm" admits you caused harm, which seems necessary for an apology. "Any" is a bit like those "I'm sorry if you were offended" non-apologies, though in this case the rest of the message does better than that.

I would go with "We apologize for the harm [that] we caused" which seems the most natural choice while explicitly acknowledging that some harm was caused. "All the harm" does indeed come across as a bit inflated, as other commenters have mentioned.

As others have said, 'any harm' implies that there might be none, while 'all harm' implies there is definitely some harm. So, 'all harm' is definitely the better choice of words for an apology (in this context.)

I am surprised to see people hung up on this, because the rest of the letter acknowledges specific harms done. To me, it really seems like a minor thing, and something that I might have written (as a native English speaker.)

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