Is the usage "damning" rude?

Not really. If you had asked the same question in 1950, the answer would have been different.

Thanks.

Does "prominent apologies" mean "great apologies"?

Context:
"People should be able to rely on a good regulatory system as well to get the sort of redress they want, whether that is prominent apologies or fines for newspapers or the other things that are clearly so necessary."

In that sentence, "prominent" probably means obvious or public.

Som thoughts... if what Oristar meant to ask was whether the use of the word "damning" was "rude", in the sense of being profanity, then I do not believe that it has been so since before 1900, and I am not sure if it ever was.

There is such a thing as "religious swearing" where people make utterances such as "Hell!" and "Damn!" or "Damnation!" and these are still regarded as bad by a few quaintly od-fashioned people, mainly Americans. However, the word "damning" meaning "condemning" or "extremely critical" is a perfectly respectable word, and never has been a profanity.

You just can't pass up the opportunity to slam the Americans, can you?

Your hypocrisy, again, Set, is right out of this world. Stop being such a crybaby, and a badly hypocritical one at that.

Contrex gave his opinion, fairly, I believe. You have to admit that the US, for all its wildness, has a puritanical streak a mile wide.

I didn't think that saying some Americans were quaintly old fashioned about "profanity" was exactly "slamming" them. As it happens, I don't exactly think that the sun shines out of Uncle Sam's arse, and I have never made a secret of that, but if I wanted to "slam" them, I can think of things to say that are a lot worse than noting that nowhere else in the world do people asterisk out the 'e' in "Hell" and the 'a' in "damn".

Your comment assumes that Americans are "worse" in such matters than other people. I think it entirely reasonable to assume, for example, that there are religious nutters in England--there certainly are elsewhere in the English speaking world. Here in Canada, we get the door-to-door Jesus crown all the time. The recent (last roughly thirty years) creationist/intelligent design movement got its start in Australia. Mel Gibson's father moved to Australia to be with other fundamentalist Catholic nutters like himself. (He seems to have been disappointed--one is tempted to assume that the fundamentalist Catholic nutters in Oz were not nutters enough to please him.)

For religious extremism, you can't do better than several of the more militant Muslim groups, whether Sunni or Shi'ite. Your assumptions about Americans seem to me to be part and parcel with your oft expressed contempt for the United States, Americans and all things American. It may surprise you to learn that the rest of the world is not exactly enamored of the United Kingdom or the English.

I see you manage to both include and ignore the Welsh, Scots and Northern Irish. To alter an oft-uttered US remark, it seems to me that everyone in the world is either British or wants to be. Or else a fool.

I agree, and also think that there are some extreme Jewish groups that are very weird indeed. Weird, and not to mince words, evil.

Silly boy . . . everybody loves the Celts.

...uh...that's the Boston basketball team you're talking about, right?

Sure, Bubba . . . you just keep thinking that.

I have a cousin who works for the BBC. She spent a couple of months stateside. She was given a package of what to do and not to do while living there. The most peculiar was a list of what not to say on air. 'Hell' was one of the top ten, as in bloody hell, what the hell was that? If the story was actually about hell, it was allowed.

That's crap, Roger. It's just plain wrong.

Why don't you get out of the being-helpful business, because believe me, you're not.

Ah, if only McTag and JTT would show up before the rest of us waste our pitiful efforts.

You seem at least to be aware of the problem. I'm sorry to be blunt, but you really should exercise more care and circumspection.

You might notice that four people on thread have answered the question in one way or another.

You might also notice that you were not one of them.

Correct, it had already been answered. I only wanted to point out that you had posted an unhelpful, and wrong, howler.