Learn English – Would “sorry the late” be a legitimate construction

ellipsisidiomsmeaning-in-contextslang

I am a non-native english speaker and I play an online multiplayer game where we send messages each other all the time. When I message someone and they take a long time to reply, it's not uncommon for me to receive "sorry my late" or "sorry my late to reply" at the beginning of their message. I got very used to this and started to say it myself, but now I wonder if this is grammatically correct.

When I stop to think about it, I guess that a correct phrase would be "I'm sorry for my late" or "[Please] Apologize my late", but "Sorry my late" seems just wrong…

So, is it technically wrong? Is it acceptable?

Best Answer

All of those phrases are wrong, as it happens.

The correct phrase would normally be "[I am] sorry [that] I am late", but you could also say "[I am] sorry for my lateness". (The words in brackets are optional, but implied if you leave them out — that's just the way the sentences are constructed. And of course you can contract "I am" as "I'm" as usual.)

You can't be sorry (an adjective) for late (an adjective); you can be sorry for lateness (the noun form of that adjective), or for being late, or you can apologize for being late, or for lateness, or whatever. But if you did something a little wrong (being late), you're the one who would apologize for that, not the others. Instead, you could (if you wanted to be rather formal) say "[Please] forgive my lateness", or even "[Please] forgive my delay". But on an MMO that formality probably belongs in in-character/RP chat and nowhere else.

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