Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 12 April 2008

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

issue 12 April 2008

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

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’.

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