But when F1 in the US appointed Steve Sexton as president it announced: "He will be a tremendous asset to our operation going forward." You would think that Formula 1 was an organisation that, self-evidently, did not need to underline the direction in which it was moving. Comically, her interviewee shot back with a "going forward". It even came from the mouth of the multilingual Emily Maitlis on Newsnight the other evening. While it may have started in corporate America, "going forward" has now penetrated every area of British life. It cites nonsenses such as: "He's coming back to help going forward" "We cannot back down, going forward" "Problems for England's backs, going forward" "Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, going forward." The last one was a joke, of course: Abraham Lincoln would never have perpetrated such a solecism. Kellaway has fought a valiant but ultimately doomed campaign against "going forward".Īnother attempt was made by a British website, the Institution of Silly and Meaningless Sayings (isms), which kept a "going-forward-ometer" until the people running it gave up, exasperated, nine months later, after recording hundreds of instances. Given the mess that American capitalism is in, we should not be surprised to learn that the body that regulates the nation's stock exchanges, among other things, specialises in obfuscation. But my former colleague at the Financial Times, Lucy Kellaway, has accused the US Securities and Exchange Commission. It is difficult to pinpoint the birth of "going forward". I blame the businessmen and women of America – still the undisputed world leader in abusing the English language. Going forward, you will likely see this turning up everywhere: 'Our company expects to make a profit going forward' 'We don't expect any layoffs going forward'." A newer development in corporate doublespeak, in most companies it is grounds for dismissal to release a press release without mentioning something 'going forward'. The other, less scatalogical definition is: "Going forward is purported to mean 'in the future' or 'somewhere down the road' when in fact it is an attempt to dodge the use of these words, which generally indicate 'I don't know'. Why do people speak like this? The online Urban Dictionary offers two possible explanations: the first defines "going forward" as "a phrase that business people use to mean someone completely fucked up big time but we don't want to dwell on whose fault it was instead can we all just adopt an optimistic outlook and please can we all start thinking about the future, not the shithole of a present that we're in?" I heard somebody say a few days ago: "Going forward, the plan is … " How can a plan be about anything but the future? Planning the past would be a remarkable facility. But it is especially infuriating when used with the word plan. It is sometimes deployed as an add-on – a kind of burp – at the end of a sentence sometimes, as with "like" or "you know", it seems to serve as punctuation.
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