A point of English??

[dannyboy]

One phrase that annoys me is "Going forward" - I think people mean "In future".

[EtchedPixels]

The people who made , painted or installed the sign are just ignorant
sods, it's that simple.

They are very smart. If they point out errors on signs people order they get abuse, if they keep quiet they get guaranteed repeat business

Alan

[EtchedPixels]

Another that annoys me :
"At this point in time".
What's wrong with NOW.

They don't quite mean the same thing and the latter can be ambiguous ?

At least in spoken form there are two meanings to

"Now, we know Dave is a twit"

one is that we have made a recent discovery about Dave and we didn't know he was a twit before this. The other is that it's something we all know about Dave and is being introduced as a point of argument or reasoning in the sense of "Given that Dave is a twit, we should plan to ...."

For cases like "now the XYZ is not selling well" the distinction is important.


On the other hand every time I see "going forward..." with respect to something that isn't an object that moves I get the urge to pointedly score it out and replace it with "In future" or "From now on" (or frequently "X didn't work, lets try Y"). It seems to mostly be a management speak way of avoiding saying "the old plan failed".

Alan

[Agrippa]

A company I worked for was full of people who were always

running things up the flagpole
touching base
doing the numbers
going the extra mile

The company ( Tenon financial group) went bust, because
the people who did the numbers did them wrongly...

[austinbob]

The company ( Tenon financial group) went bust, because
the people who did the numbers did them wrongly...

Probably cos of too much blue sky thinking moving forward. 

[Sprintex]

The company ( Tenon financial group) went bust, because
the people who did the numbers did them wrongly...

Probably cos of too much blue sky thinking moving forward. 

Thinking out of the box here but taking a helicopter view of it I think you're right


Paul

[deibid]

Amazing thread! keep it going please, for me as a Spaniard in the UK this is priceless...
(don't be too harsh about my English )

[Agrippa]

Your English is probably better than half the galoots shuffling about
the streets slurping coffee with their headphones at full blast.

[Dorsetmike]

Slightly different was one boss who would frequently say

"Don't confuse me with facts my mind's made up"

[deibid]

 
I live in West Yorkshire....  sometimes I have a hard time trying to work out people's accents

Your English is probably better than half the galoots shuffling about
the streets slurping coffee with their headphones at full blast.

[Agrippa]

You can always tell a Yorkshireman, but you can't tell him much...

[PostModN66]

We have two choices; to model in N gauge or OO.

NO! that's ONE choice!!!!!!!!!!

That's mine out!

Jon   

[EtchedPixels]

I live in West Yorkshire....  sometimes I have a hard time trying to work out people's accents

In the second world war they had this wonderful idea that reading the news in local dialects would confound the enemy. Unfortunately it confounded most of the UK as well

[keithfre]

galoots

That's a new one on me!

[keithfre]

One phrase that annoys me is "Going forward"

Me too! I reckon it's management-speak designed to create the illusion of dynamism.

Another one I hate is 'convince' (to do something) instead of 'persuade' etc. 'Convince' always used to be about beliefs, not willingness.

As a student of language history I realize that these shifts in meaning and usage are part of normal language development. I suppose what annoys me most is the uncritical way people replace clear, tried and tested usages with imprecise or ambiguous ones, or Americanisms where we had perfectly good English usages (the ubiquitous 'aka' instead of 'alias', for instance).