Ok. Moving this here.
Not at all. Apologizing for your ignorance wasn’t necessary. Ignorance isn’t something to apologize for. Ignorance is inevitable. If you mean to apologize for giving offense, apologize for giving offense. Apologizing for ignorance rather than for giving offense is rather like apologizing for the laws of physics, rather than apologizing for bumping into someone. One of those things was something you could prevent. The other, underlying condition, was not.
It’s hardly hair-splitting. If I don’t know what offense I’ve given, how can I apologize for it? Should I offer up some kind of lame ‘Whatever it was, I’m sorry’? I’m not going to say that. And I’d like to explain why, because I don’t want you thinking that my refusal is an indication of malice or animus. Just the opposite.
“Whatever it was, I’m sorry” has to be one of the single most offensive and denigrating statements someone can make. It comes in a lot of different subtle variations, but they’re all insulting. An apology is an expression of regret or remorse, and is supposed to indicate an acknowledgment of error and perhaps even a lesson learned. That kind of open-ended nonsense shows there’s nothing learned, no error acknowledged. A lot of people will try to conflate the ‘whatever it was, I’m sorry’ response with sympathy. ‘I’m sorry that this happened to you’. But that’s all that is: that’s sympathy. That’s not an apology, and it’s not intended as one.
The ‘whatever it was’ construction is right up there with ‘if anyone was offended, I’m sorry’. That’s a classic ‘non-apology apology’. It puts the onus on the person feeling offense, not the person giving offense. It essentially asserts that the listener, not the speaker, is the problem.
When you apologize, you should know why. You should know what it is you’re apologizing for. Otherwise, how can you avoid repeating the offense in the future?