If the Romney team believed their own inevitability rhetoric, failing to invest for victory yesterday just as they did before South Carolina, that doesn’t auger well for their ability to make sound decisions later on.

What’s the problem? (Or should that be “What are the problems?”)

–Robert Stacy McCain, The Other McCain

“We are working directly with the family after sincerely apologizing and issuing a full refund for their less-than-positive travel experience,” Southwest spokesman Brad Hawkins said Sunday night. “We certainly will take away any potential learnings from this experience in our constant evaluation of how to provide the best possible customer service, which is second only to the safety of every passenger.”

Setting aside the situation that led this (the short version: Chris and Heather Dainiak, parents of a terminally ill boy, were told their son could not fly sitting in his protective chair, even though he had used it on another Southwest flight just days earlier), I have to ask: what makes people talk this way? A “less than positive travel experience?” “Potential learnings?”

Rule Number One of corporate apologies is: Never spin. Acknowledge the situation as honestly and objectively as you can.

Mr. Hawkins may be a fine, compassionate fellow, but when he uses phrases like “less than positive travel experience,” he sounds like his number one concern is minimizing the damage to his company’s image, rather than offering a heartfelt apology to the Dainiak family and doing everything possible to make amends.

What is “less than positive?” Neutral or negative. Nobody would say the Dainiaks’ experience was neutral, therefore, it was negative. It was bad. So cut the crap, ditch the spin, and admit what everyone already knows.

I have no idea who added the “potential learnings” locution to this statement (I’m betting that it was the product of a committee), but they should have been smacked with a dead mackerel. “Learnings” is bad enough, but to tack on “potential,” as if the management and workers of Southwest might not actually learn anything from this situation is staggering.

Everybody screws up. Everybody needs to apologize. When it’s your turn, try to sound like a human being, and speak or write in plain English, not in corporate speak.

Related content:

• Delivering bad news
• Bad news, bad form

[L]ike most things on the planet, thinking about doing it is a lot worse than simply sitting down and doing it. The writing wasn’t hard to do, you just need to plant ass in seat and go from there.

What are you thinking about writing?

Meanwhile, The Daily Beast figures North Dakota’s Grand Forks, Bismarck and Fargo are the Nos. 2, 3, and 4 coldest cities in the United States, respectfully.

Can you spot the error? Share your answer in the comments.

And for those of you wondering whether I got carried away with a thesaurus while composing the headline…

Yes. Yes I did.

The day before, his sister Dolly Wambach, of Georgetown, Minn., and family spent about 12 hours loading the tops into a trailer borrowed to him by friend Shawn Olson for the transport.

This is a common error in the Midwest, especially in conversation, but borrow and loan or lend are not synonyms. To borrow means “to receive something with the promise to return it,” while to lend or to loan mean “to give something on condition that it will be returned.”

In other words, it’s the difference between give and receiving. I can give or lend something to you, and I can borrow or receive something from you.

Here’s a usage oddity: people often use borrow in the place of lend or loan, but I’ve never heard someone make the mistake the other way around.

[Note: the Forum corrected the error before printing it in the newspaper, and have since corrected the story on their website.]

Yes!

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This is the first time my blog has been nominated for an award like this, and it feels a bit odd to ask, but I would be grateful for your support.

Please click here and vote.

I’ve already written about the overuse of intensifiers, our habit of tacking adverbs like very, really, and extremely onto words in an attempt to turn up the intensity of our language. While adding an intensifier sometimes makes sense, we can usually find a word that already has the intensity we want.

And then there are times when you simply should not modify a word’s intensity at all. I read an essay recently that described something as being “very imperative.” This will not do.

Imperative means “absolutely necessary or required; unavoidable.” Just as there are no shades of pregnancy (you either are pregnant, or you are not), there are no degrees of intensity with the word imperative. There is no volume knob, because being imperative is a binary state. Something either is imperative, or it isn’t, and so the intensifier very doesn’t add any information.

Remember that some words have no gradation, no variation of intensity, and therefore it is useless to graft a modifier to them. Things are everlasting, unique, monochromatic, or symmetrical, or they are not. These words don’t work with intensifiers, just like a coffee maker doesn’t come with a speed control—it’s either on or it’s off.

Think of it this way: if it wouldn’t make sense to modify a word with a diminishing adverb like slightly, then it doesn’t make sense to add an intensifier like very. It doesn’t make sense to say something is slightly imperative, therefore it’s equally nonsensical to say it’s very imperative.