They Take it Seriously? Oh, Sure
...Try this: Plug “we take” and “very seriously” into a Google News or Yahoo News search. You’ll get hundreds of hits, albeit some repeats, where some big institution - corporate, educational, government, whatever - makes a giant blunder and then issues a “we take (insert the violated policy) very seriously” statement.
The news indexes of Google and Yahoo contain only the recent past, and not all media organizations. Run the same query on LexisNexis, and the number of hits grows exponentially. In other words, we have a trend.
...On December 14, after it was revealed that patients’ medical data went missing from a data-management company in Ohio, the healthcare provider’s spokesman intoned, “(W)e take this sort of thing very seriously,” according to a Pennsylvania TV station.
Taking things seriously isn’t limited to privacy slip-ups. A Texas district attorney, reacting to a Dallas newspaper’s successful campaign to unseal Catholic Church documents about alleged sexual-abuse cover-ups, said, “We take these kinds of abuse scenarios very seriously” (The Dallas Morning News, December 15).
And when a Maryland day-care center lost track of two children in a recent week, a spokeswoman told the local newspaper, “We are very sorry this has happened at our center and we take this matter very seriously.”
...Almost invariably, however, when I read or hear someone taking such things seriously, I think: They care mainly about getting caught, not screwing up. Otherwise, these things would happen far less often.
No doubt, this language is at least partly lawyer-driven. You can take something seriously - sort of, kind of acknowledging the mistake - while avoiding a hint of actual guilt.
But PR weasel-words don’t make the situation even slightly better, especially given the frequency of their use. They fuel cynicism and devalue the language.
A straight apology? That, we might take seriously.
No comments:
Post a Comment