There are some popular phrases that just grate on my nerves. You find them everywhere, especially when people are speaking on TV. They are just filler, often not serving any real function, and almost always they can be eliminated with any loss of clarity.

Here is an example that I found in a recent post by PZ Myers where he quoted the CEO of some video company saying the following:

“We’ve been a little bit too romantic about the idea that we should have employees and give people long-term job security. I think that got us into a place where, reaching the heights of Monument Valley 3 [production], contractors were always a relatively low percentage of our employee base. I think that’s something we’re looking to change going forward.

I think going forward, we’ll see that we’ve got a core team and any growth will come through contractors, which is something I hate about the industry. I’ve been in the industry for 20 years, and those of us who joined in the early 2000s, we had it very good. You want to be able to give that kind of stability […] but I think that’s a shift in how we want to work with people going forward.”

Notice that in the short space, she used the phrase ‘going forward’ three times. I do not want to be too harsh in my criticism because she was making a speech. When one is speaking extemporaneously, it is hard to avoid using cliches and I too have done so. As George Orwell wrote in his essay Politics and the English Language:

When you are composing in a hurry — when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech — it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.

I too when speaking in public and making an argument on the fly, have sometimes found myself unable to find the right way to bring the thought to a satisfactory end and so insert some filler, kicking myself while doing so.

But if the above speaker was reading from a prepared speech, then that is less excusable. When writing, one has to be ruthless in editing out redundancies such as these and carefully choose words to fit the point one is trying to make.. But that requires some time and attention to detail on the author’s part and, as Orwell says, it appears that some are unwilling to make that extra effort.

But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.

Orwell says that he is not advocating some kind of language orthodoxy.

To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a “standard English” which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one’s meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a “good prose style.” On the other hand, it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one’s meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them.[My italics-MS]

In writing these blog posts, I have some point that I wish to make but do not have the luxury to edit multiple times. It is when the writing comes most easily, when the words just flow out, that I have to be most vigilant, because that may mean that I am too receptive to ready-made phrases (like ‘going forward’) and have surrendered to them.