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Wednesday 9 July 2008

Mind your language

The last two words of my column last week were ‘in future’. The new annoying equivalent to this phrase is going forward.

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The last two words of my column last week were ‘in future’. The new annoying equivalent to this phrase is going forward. It is much used by management-brains and media-types.

I told my husband that I was looking out for examples in the press, and he came back with a handful of cuttings about football matches. The footballing usage, as I patiently explained to him as he turned to the whisky on the sideboard, is spatial, not temporal.

There is another variant in meaning, which seems to signify the same as going on. Joan Bakewell twice used the phrase in this sense in the same article in the Independent. She wrote of ‘many investigations and tests going forward on marijuana’ and later mentioned that ‘work is going forward steadily to find a treatment’. It clearly has the connotation of progress, with perhaps an old-fashioned leftist consensus flavour about it, as if new developments were bound to be better.

In the same paper Tracey Emin discussed getting drunk, and mentioned in a self-helpish way ‘belief in a better way of going forward’. The presumption is that the passage of time is accompanied by voluntary movement in a certain path.

In the following example, from the Observer, going forward to seems to mean ‘up to’: ‘The consensus figure on the world’s power consumption going forward to 2015 is simply wrong.’

The simple sense of ‘in the future’ is exemplified by something that Greg Dyke said in an interview with the Independent: ‘ITV spends twice as much on original production as any other commercial channel in Europe and that’s not sustainable going forward.’

On another unwelcomely popular topic of conversation, Anthony Hilton in the Evening Standard wrote: ‘Going forward, American economists widely predict that house prices, which are already down an estimated 10 per cent, could fall by another fifth.’ This beautifully illustrates the orphan status of the participle going. What is meant to be going forward here — the economists, the house prices?

But the phrase is losing its nature as a participle or gerund. In politicians’ answers to interviewers on Today, it is an oral mark of punctuation, to signal the hoped-for line in the sand. We’re all going forward now.

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