Opinion · Language & Culture
“We’d love to have you. No pressure. Please.” That was how Kylie Kelce ended her invitation to the Princess of Wales on her podcast, Not Gonna Lie. It was warm and a little cheeky. It also called her “Princess Kate, Duchess of Cambridge,” and neither part of that title is correct.
A week later, Kelce said she hadn’t known and would do better. I think the mistake was ordinary and the apology was good. With a cultural slip like this, the slip itself matters less than what the person does next.
What is actually being discussed?
- On September 24, 2026, Kelce invited Catherine onto Not Gonna Lie, pointing to field hockey and raising children as shared interests.
- She also noted that Prince William had appeared on New Heights, the podcast her husband Jason hosts with his brother Travis, in July.
- She referred to Catherine as “Princess Kate, Duchess of Cambridge.” Catherine has been The Princess of Wales since September 2022, and royal convention avoids “Princess Kate.”
- On October 1, Kelce said: “I was unaware that calling Princess Catherine Princess Kate was offensive. I didn’t know that. Now I know that. Now I will proceed accordingly.”
Sources: AOL, IBTimes UK, The Royal Family
Nobody looks up what they think they already know
One common reaction to slips like this is that a public figure should have checked first. That sounds fair until you ask a simple question. Checked what, exactly?
Kelce wasn’t guessing. From where she stood, “Princess Kate” was simply the name she had always heard, so it felt like the normal way to say it. People search for things they know they are unsure about. They don’t search for things they believe they already know.
Psychologist David Dunning has a name for this kind of gap. In a 2011 review of his research, he wrote that the scope of people’s ignorance is often invisible to them. The things we don’t know we don’t know, the “unknown unknowns,” never show up as questions in the first place.
That is why “you should have looked it up” doesn’t quite work here. It assumes she felt a doubt she had no reason to feel.
Not knowing another country’s etiquette isn’t a character flaw. It is the default. Most Americans have never had to learn how British royal titles work. Most British people have never had to learn the workplace title rules of countries far from their own. The gap isn’t a scandal. It is just where everyone starts.
Keating, Obama and Dolce & Gabbana got very different endings
Royal etiquette slips are old news. What makes them worth comparing is how differently they played out.
Paul Keating, 1992: no apology, and a nickname that stuck
During the Queen’s 1992 visit to Australia, Prime Minister Paul Keating put a hand on her back to guide her through a crowd. Touching the monarch broke protocol. British papers called him “the Lizard of Oz,” as the Museum of Australian Democracy recounts. Keating said he was only showing her the way. Many people doubted that, given his open support for an Australian republic.
He never framed it as a mistake to learn from. The gesture was quickly read as a political statement, and the nickname followed him for decades. When nobody says “I got that wrong,” people fill in the meaning themselves.
Michelle Obama, 2009: same rule, warm ending
Seventeen years later, Michelle Obama put her arm around the Queen at Buckingham Palace. By the Christian Science Monitor’s account, the Queen had put her own arm around Obama first. The Queen even told her, “Now we’ve met, will you please keep in touch?”
The rule was the same one Keating broke. But this time the person on the other side treated the gesture as warmth, not disrespect. It shows that a broken rule only becomes an offense when someone reads it that way.
Dolce & Gabbana, 2018: when the response made it worse
This case is much more serious than a wrong title, but it shows what a bad response looks like. In November 2018, Dolce & Gabbana released ads showing a Chinese model struggling to eat Italian food with chopsticks. Then screenshots of insulting private messages from co-founder Stefano Gabbana spread online. The brand’s first answer was that his account had been hacked, NBC News reported.
Its Shanghai show was cancelled and retailers pulled its products. When the founders finally apologized on video, many viewers saw it as a “non-apology” that asked forgiveness “if we have made mistakes,” according to Fast Company. Brand Finance estimated the damage could cut the brand’s value by up to 20%. The “if” and the excuse cost more than the original ads.
What researchers found in a working apology
Kelce’s apology was only four short sentences. That brevity was part of why I think it worked.
In a 2016 study from Ohio State University, Roy Lewicki and his colleagues tested six parts of an apology with 755 participants. The two most important were admitting responsibility and offering to repair the problem. The least important was asking for forgiveness. Lewicki said that one can be left out if you have to.
Now read Kelce’s words again. “I didn’t know that” explains what went wrong. “Now I know that” admits the mistake without a “but.” “Now I will proceed accordingly” is a promise about the future. She didn’t ask anyone to forgive her, and she didn’t need to.
Compare that with Dolce & Gabbana. They opened with an excuse and later apologized “if” there were mistakes. Kelce did the opposite. She named the gap in her knowledge and said she would change.
One way to read the difference: a good apology closes the story, and a defensive one keeps it open. The more someone argues about whether they did anything wrong, the longer everyone keeps talking about it.
The apology is only half the job
An apology is a promise, and a promise only means something if it holds. The full process, as I see it, has three steps:
- Say sorry clearly when the mistake is real.
- Promise it won’t happen again.
- Actually learn it, so it doesn’t.
The first two take one sentence each. The third is where the real test is. If Kelce says “Princess Kate” on her show again next month, the apology turns into words. If she gets the title right from now on, the whole episode becomes a small, finished lesson.
That is also why I don’t think the original mistake deserves much criticism. A first slip in someone else’s culture tells you almost nothing about a person. A second slip, after they’ve been told, tells you a lot more.
This matters well beyond royal titles. People cross cultures all the time now, through podcasts, social media, work and travel. Everyone is going to call someone by the wrong name, bow when they should shake hands, or use first names where a title was expected.
If every first slip is treated as a scandal, people learn to stay quiet and stop reaching out. Kelce’s invitation was a friendly gesture across a cultural line. Punishing it hard would teach the wrong lesson.
How I’d judge the next cultural slip
When the next public figure gets someone’s title, custom or name wrong, I’d ask four questions before deciding how much it matters:
- Was it reasonable not to know? If the wrong version is what most people around them say, the mistake is ordinary.
- Did they own it plainly? “I didn’t know, now I do” beats any apology that starts with “if.”
- Did they say what changes? A promise about next time is the part that does the work.
- Does it happen again? This is the only question that tells you something about the person.
By those standards, Kelce is doing fine so far. The last question is the one still open, and only time will answer it.
Related: Iced Coffee at a Job Interview? Why the Drink Matters Less Than the Attitude
Editorial note: This is an opinion piece based on public reporting as of October 2, 2026. The cases mentioned differ a lot in seriousness and are compared here only for how each response played out. The featured image is AI-generated.