See the Macintosh User Interface Guidelines for the original Mac. They thought this through.
Error messages were to be two sentences. The first one explains the problem. The second sentence says what to do about it. There were rules for buttons, too. "Your file has been lost" should have a button that says "Sorry", not "OK".
Why "Sorry" as a button? It sounds pretty awkward to me. I wouldn't be sure what clicking it would do. And, the button text is usually the option that I choose, but why would I say "sorry"?
I remember this from ~1995. The Mac would crash (often), then before rebooting say something equivalent to
"we have lost all of your data. Click OK". I didn't want to click an OK button - I wanted an apology for losing my data.
On re-boot, it would say "you did not shut down your computer properly".
Error messages were to be two sentences. The first one explains the problem. The second sentence says what to do about it. There were rules for buttons, too. "Your file has been lost" should have a button that says "Sorry", not "OK".