A hug’s life: Pixar’s John Lasseter leads the way in Hollywood’s golden age of euphemism.

What a golden age of euphemism we are living through. Each night brings a snowfall of fresh allegations against powerful men; each morning a flurry of exquisitely sorrowful statements that can’t bring themselves to say precisely what they are sorry about.

Is anyone collating all these in a really expensive coffee table book yet, perhaps to offset any downturn in studio profits incurred by having to axe people and projects now tainted by Unpleasantness? There should definitely be a special font for these quasi-apologies. Comic Sans Underwear. Comic Sans Career. Comic Sans a Clue How They Sound.

Venerated talkshow host Charlie Rose thought he was “pursuing shared feelings” but now has “a profound new respect for women and their lives”. That, right there, is beautiful. I mean, it’s not up to me to tell our apology book publishers how to lay out their lavish product, but I really hope they illustrate this one with a reconstruction photo of a 75-year-old man answering his dressing room door, to some underling five decades his junior, with his dick out.

Several other fallen angels have gone with the circumlocution “uncomfortable situation”, which is a place they are sorry if they’ve put any women. And all, but all, absolutely “respect women”.

And yet … there is something so screamingly absurd about chaps who appear to have spent the best part of two decades issuing orders from open bathrobes suddenly being overcome by such fits of euphemistic primness. Their apologies come with inbuilt lace hankies as standard, masterclasses in not causing even linguistic offence by doing anything so coarse as to hint even remotely at what it is they’ve done.