Learn English – Does “Excuse him.” make sense

word-usage

"Excuse me." is very often used in our daily conversation, and I learned the phrase "Excuse us." used when involving more than two persons. Then, how about "Excuse him / her / them."? For example, when you want your little kid to get out of the elevator ( which is packed with people and only your kid must leave ), can you say, "Excuse him." when it is a boy, and "Excuse her." when It is a girl?

Best Answer

Yes, but ...

Saying "excuse him" is usually patronizing, implying that the other person is not responsible or polite enough to make his own apologies. If you're talking about a child, "Oh, please excuse my son, he doesn't know any better", well, we expect children to not be responsible. But if you say it about someone else, "Please excuse Fred", that's almost certainly insulting to Fred.

It may be, of course, that your intent is to say that Fred is irresponsible or rude, in which case "excuse him" would be totally appropriate.

The one example I can think of where it would not be insulting would be if the person could not be expected to know that something he did was inappropriate. Like, "Oh, please excuse Fred. He's still learning English, he didn't mean that statement the way it sounded."

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