It has long been a curiosity why, when we have perfectly good
words in our rich language, we are so eager to jump on the bandwagon of the
latest Rube Goldberg-concoction and turn it into a buzzword.
A somewhat recent example: “Going forward.”
Now, I am a soccer fan. And, for as long as I remember, “going
forward” is what a soccer team does when it is on the attack. It’s a simple,
apt description of something or someone moving in a defined direction in the physical
world.
Nowadays, it has become almost standard vernacular used to describe
something else. And the description is not nearly so apt, if it is apt at all.
We used to say, “in the future” or “from now on” or, if you wanted
to sound pretentious, you might say, “henceforth” or “hereafter” or “from this
time forth.” All those words and phrases mean what they mean, cannot mean
anything else, and are perfectly descriptive.
“Going forward”? Not so.
Then there’s the long-standing philosophical argument about whether
time moves in a “forward” direction at all, or whether it moves around and
around in a cycle. But we’ll leave that discussion to the philosophers.
Years ago, in a meeting at the office, a coworker used “going
forward” when it was still fresh and new. Afterward, I asked him why, and he
said he did not know any other way to say what he meant. I guess he forgot
that, as recently as the day before, he would have been perfectly happy to say,
“from now on.”
Stupid.
