The subject is recantation: the coerced word, the public taking back of a belief by a person who has been given no real choice. We use the word recant without hearing what is buried inside it. It comes from the Latin for singing again. To recant is to sing your own song over, backward, in front of the people who marched you to the microphone. A confession of error that someone else wrote. An apology the speaker does not mean, in a room where everyone knows he does not mean it. The act has a sound, and the sound is a voice saying the opposite of what its owner believes, out loud, so the saying can be witnessed. Once you start listening for that sound, you hear it everywhere.
