KEY POINTS:
There is a fashionable bar in Ponsonby called Mea Culpa - a Latin phrase taken from the Roman Catholic Mass which means "my own fault".
It is a fitting name. Along with Campari cocktails, roman sandals and lamé playsuits, mea culpas are dead cool this season; c'mon down Millie Holmes, Trevor Mallard, Doug Howlett.
It makes the rest of us feel lousy with good behaviour if you don't have something to atone for. And with celebrity apologies de rigueur, corporate ones have become less painful too.
It seems you can behave as messily or negligently as you want as long as you give yourself a jolly good flogging afterwards. The media gets in on the mea maxima culpa (my most grievous fault) ritual too.
But it seems the more trivial the offence, the more squirming and Baldrick-like the apology.
"We misspelled the word misspelled twice, as mispelled, in the Corrections and Clarifications column on September 26, page 30," the Guardian grovelled recently in an apology for an apology.
In the UK, television makers have indulged in a festival of flagellation over various bits of surreptitious TV trickery: rigging a phone-in competition, editing a doco on the Queen to make it look as though she had a hissy fit (although she hadn't) and even the common practice of "noddies" - where a presenter fakes listening intently to an interviewee, nodding sagely and the footage is edited in later - are considered shameful. (Not everyone is sorry about those though. As the thinking woman's bogan, Jeremy Clarkson, admitted: "What I like to do instead of nodding and looking earnest is yawn. It drives the director mad.")
Saying sorry for teensy things is an exceptionally effective tactic for corporates - it leaves the aggrieved party high and dry and gives the impression of honesty. And as we all know, if you can fake that, you've got it made.
Since saying sorry doesn't seem to have the stigma it used to, PR advisers are quicker to admit wrongdoing in order to shut down a story. It's darn annoying for journalists. "Well, I said sorry, didn't I?" leaves the story nowhere to go.
The other day I was a guest on Jim Mora's panel on National Radio, and began by apologising for my own ignorance: "I may be a thickie but ... " My fellow panellist, spin doctor Brian Edwards, quickly pulled me up, pointing out how when people say they are stupid they are really waiting for someone to jump in and disagree. As Edwards knows, straw man apologies are bogus.
Because, funnily enough, when apologies really are called for, they don't seem so easy or forthcoming. Leaky homes, finance company collapses, paying too much tax. All apologies? Er, not so much.
Consumer-rights programme Target sparked a national outcry and a government probe in August when it gleefully revealed it had found dangerous levels of formaldehyde in children's clothes.
It later emerged that the company that made the programme, Top Shelf, had used the wrong test; testing clothing for total formaldehyde content rather than for unbound "free" formaldehyde.
Top Shelf's response? Mea Culpa; that's a bar isn't it?
