Is there such a thing as a *surefire apology, guaranteed to smooth the *ruffled feathers of any offended party? A key part of any good apology is to assure the victim that your bad behavior won’t happen again. Edwin Battistella, a *linguistics expert from Southern Oregon University, suggests doing it the way your mother taught you. Say you throw a stone at your buddy. “She’d have you go and look them in the eye... and say, ‘I’m sorry I threw the stone at you, and I won’t do it again’. It’s important to name what you did wrong, to show yourself as being penitent in some way and to indicate what might be different in the future,” Battistella is quoted by the BBC as saying.