Judith Lacy's Jottings: Three certainties in life - death, taxes and word changes

The choices are endless, but don't choose going forward. Photo / Unsplash

OPINION:

The spine has faded from bright red to a washed out pink. The page edges have turned yellow and some light brown spots have appeared on the front pages, creeping towards the text that is remarkably small to my ancient eyes.

I doubt I'll read Bryce Courtenay's The Power of One again yet I can't bring myself to get rid of it. It was where I first came across the word talisman all those decades ago. I doubt I've ever used the word in a sentence - oral or written, but when I've read it I've known what it means.

I don't have the same fondness for ubiquitous. I can still see it in the scholarship English student's top essay, in the first paragraph almost mocking my ignorance at its meaning. I'd been given the essay to inspire me to do something similar. I decided to not even study scholarship English, the prescribed summer reading pile untouched save for the occasional dusting. And as for spelling ubiquitous with all those vowels! Everywhere is fine for me.

When I taught English to adults, mainly former refugees, I'd quickly acknowledge English is a crazy language. It's partly because English is a hodgepodge of other languages, partly because it has as many exceptions as rules. It also has the most words.

Facebook is a great source of mangled English. The two most common phrases that raise my eyebrow every time I see them are "admin delete if not aloud" and "draws for sale". The first also amuses me as page and group administrators won't be worried whether they have the poster's permission before deleting it. The second is always accompanied by a photo of drawers, not a list of names for a sports game.

Something I would like to delete is my memory of pointing out to a chief executive he'd made a typo and "potable" should be "portable" water. Note to self - it's not always safe to open your mouth.

I did manage to keep my surprise more in check when someone I didn't think knew much about the English language told me you use blond for men and blonde for women. I quickly checked and he was right. I will never forget that lesson.

In the same workplace we were all taught how to work out if you mean stationery or stationary - a pen is an item of stationery and it has an e in it.

I started musing on my memories of the English language when I heard a woman say on the radio: "So that's when Marty started pivoting a bit, I hate that word. We started thinking about what else we could do." It's scary how political and corporate-speak can so easily become part of our everyday conservation.

If you Google "why do people say going forward" you'll find analysis of the dreadful phrase and how some users might be deliberating choosing it to avoid fault-finding or acknowledging lessons learnt, rather drawing everyone into a sense of fuzzy wellbeing.

Those of us for who (whom, who cares) English is our mother language can count our lucky dictionaries we didn't have to learn the 12 English tenses. Past perfect continuous? Future continuous? It hurts my brain just copying and pasting the terms. We can hear "next Friday I went home" isn't right. "Going forward, we will travel to Wellington by an e-helicopter." "We will" tells us it's not now or in the past. Going forward is unnecessary and takes up precious air time.

I'm not embarrassed I had to ask a Facebook poster what "glow up" means. A makeover, a refurbishment. Now I've seen the term on a shop poster.

"Going forward, during rain events we will pivot our onboarding so we can reach out to those without umbrellas and be across all needs and leverage the most out of best practice. Make sure you bring the key takeaways to the table."

Oops, I just broke the delete key.