Expiate

Chimpanzees don’t lie awake replaying an awkward dinner conversation. We do.

Have you ever apologised for something long after everyone else had forgotten it? The memory had faded for them. But for some reason, it hadn’t for you.

Some things seem to ask something of us long after they’ve happened. They return in quiet moments. We replay them as we make a cup of tea or lie awake at night. We remember the thank-you we never quite said, the promise we almost let slip, the apology that somehow never found its way into the world.

Eventually, something shifts. The message is sent. The apology is spoken. Gratitude is finally expressed. A room is left a little tidier than we found it. A kindness is offered without expecting anything in return.

English has a word for that instinct: not simply to regret, but to make amends. Not for carrying the weight, but for setting it down.

Expiate.

It comes from the Latin expiare: to make amends completely. Hidden within it is pius - faithful, devoted, dutiful. Over the centuries, expiate became closely associated with religion, sacrifice and atonement. Yet the instinct itself is older than any church.

Chimpanzees don’t lie awake replaying an awkward dinner conversation. We do. We seem to keep invisible accounts throughout our lives. Most of us, anyway. But chimpanzees do reconcile. After conflict, they embrace, groom one another and restore the peace. The primatologist Frans de Waal spent decades observing these moments, showing that the urge to repair damaged relationships did not begin with civilisation. It reaches much further back.

Many psychologists have suggested that guilt is one of the social emotions that helped our ancestors survive. Early human life depended on trust. If you repeatedly damaged the relationships that held your community together, the consequences could be severe. Guilt may not simply have been punishment; it may have been an adaptation - an emotion gently urging us towards repairing what could still be repaired.

Dig through the deep time of expiate and you eventually reach something older than Latin: the instinct to restore balance.

Expiation is the apology finally spoken. The promise kept when breaking it would have been easier. The secret left untold, even when the gossip was delicious. Gratitude expressed while it can still be heard. The quiet kindness that nobody expected but somebody needed. The chance to tell someone they mattered before the moment passed.

One of the earliest writers to use expiate in English was Christopher Marlowe - a playwright remembered not only for the brilliance of his verse, but for rumours of espionage, tavern brawls and a life lived close to scandal. There is something fitting about that. Even one of the Elizabethan age’s great rule-breakers reached for a word that meant restoring balance after wrongdoing.

Today, expiate is rarely heard outside historical writing or theology. Instead we speak of accountability. Therapy. Healing. Restorative justice. Owning our mistakes. The vocabulary has changed. The instinct has not.

Expiation is noticing the small opportunities to put something right before they drift beyond our reach.

It’s leaving fewer unfinished things in our wake as we sail through our lives.

- the word collector, behind the counter