Phrases we love to hate

In an entertaining article 'Are you going forward? Then stop now' (BBC Magazine), Lucy Kellaway looks at the epidemic use of the phrase 'going forward' and makes fun of some of our other pet hates.
Two of the most amusing examples of the use of 'going forward' are:

'When asked if he was going to be the England captain again after his triumph with Trinidad and Tobago, David Beckham came out with the gnomic reply "Going forward, who knows." It seems that the less one has to say, the more likely one is to reach for a going forward as a crutch. Politicians find it comforting for this reason. "We are going forward" poor Hillary Clinton said just before the last, fatal primary . . . when it became indisputable that she was going nowhere of the kind.'

For nearly a decade, Lucy Kellaway wrote a fictional column in the Financial Times about a senior manager who spoke in business cliches.

She says: 'Martin Lukes talked the talk. Or rather, he added value by reaching out and sharing his blue sky thinking. At the end of the day he stepped up to the plate and delivered world class jargon that really pushed the envelope. After eight years of being him I came to accept the nouns pretending to be verbs. To task and to impact. Even the new verb to architect I almost took in my stride. I didn't even really mind the impenetrable sentences full of leveraging value and paradigm shifts. But what still rankled after so long were the little things: that he said myself instead of me and that he would never talk about a problem, when he could dialogue around an issue instead.'

It is often the little things, isn't it? I cringe when I see 'myself' used wrongly, but I think it's here to stay.

As I read on, I smiled even more broadly when Lucy Kellaway dealt with the word 'passion'.

'Passion, says the dictionary, means a strong sexual desire or the suffering of Christ at the crucifixion. In other words it doesn't really have an awful lot to do with a typical day in the office — unless things have gone very wrong indeed. And yet passion is something that every employee must attest to in order to get through any selection process.'

If you enjoy being a pedant and want to smile at our crankiness about words, visit http://news.bbc.co.uk:80/1/hi/magazine/7453584.stm

You can also click through to 50 office-speak phrases you love to hate at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7457287.stm

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