Well, Satan is something akin to a deity, too, but I'm just kidding :) Thanks, nizou, I'm doing this because it is fun. I'm glad you are being helped!

I suppose I could try answering your question. :)

"I'm afraid not" and similar phrases can be used where there is some uncertainty as to whether the unwelcome event will actually happen. You might say, for example, "I'm afraid I shall not be able to attend your dinner party this evening," or, "I'm afraid that we may have to lay off several people from this department." If you were sure that the unwelcome event must happen, you would instead say, "I'm sorry; I will not be able to attend your dinner party this evening," or, "We are going to have to lay off several people from this department."

The context in which you are most likely to use the "afraid" construction is when you are politely expressing regret in a somewhat formal social context, or in a business context ("I'm afraid I will not be able to have the report ready by Friday.").

In a very formal social context, I advise you to consult a book of formal writing etiquette. For example, you would not use "afraid" to answer a wedding invitation if you cannot go; you would say something more like, "Mr. and Mrs. Nizou deeply regret that they will not be able to attend."

I always understood "I'm afraid not" to mean something like, "I'm sorry to have to disappoint you, but no."

I suppose the "fear" represented by the word "afraid" is the same sort of thing expressed by, "The train is going to be twenty minutes late, I fear." In the latter case, the speaker is apprehensive of some unwelcome future event. In your example, the speaker is apprehensive of giving an unwelcome emotion to the person who asked for the newspaper.

Don't mean to help hijack the thread, but I always understood "when the shit hits the fan" to mean something like "the moment when the consequences of someone's inept or stupid actions are visited upon everyone in the area, including innocent bystanders."

Sully, I think you just gave me my new sig line! :) (Thanks for the compliment... I think it's a compliment... I will assume it's a compliment...)

I think the word wanted is "schlemiel."

Oh, there WAS a Murphy! The version of the Law I gave below is its popularization. See this page for details: http://www.cpuidle.de/murphy.shtml

It's just irregular, MM. One of those head-scratching idiosyncracies of the language of angels, you know? Look in the dictionary in such cases.

Murphy's Law is literally, "If anything can go wrong, it will."

Some uses, via Google:

"The United States can ill-afford to be tilting at windmills while Al Qaeda remains at large and able to operate."

"A coworker once compared me to Don Quixote, tilting at windmills, because of my efforts to fix the wrong things around me in society."

"The colorblindistas [a made-up word for people who insist that there is no such thing as differences between races] are tilting at windmills and spinning wrong-headed notions in their lofty towers.... A ban on fact gathering will only propagate fallacies and falsehoods."

"Is Joe Breeze a visionary or just tilting at windmills?"

I've seen some uses that suggest an alternative meaning, something more like "taking on an opponent that you know you cannot beat."