Going forward (was SCOTUS)

[Wilson Gray]

WRT to Alex's third paragraph: amen! I'm retired, but I ocasionally
visit my wife, who's still on the job, at her library. I hear
staffpeople using "going forward" instead of, e.g. "after we switch to
summer hours," which is all that they mean.

-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Mark Twain





On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 4:31 AM, Alex Steer <alex.steer at gmail.com> wrote:
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> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Â  Â  Â  Alex Steer <alex.steer at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject: Â  Â  Â Re: Going forward (was SCOTUS)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I've speculated on a possible sense shift from an accounting term at
> http://alexsteer.net/2008/06/going-forward/. The relevant bit was:
>
> It seems to come from the practice of management accounting. Company
> accountants are, as you’d expect, necessarily rather concerned about
> making sure that their companies have enough money to be going on with
> in order to survive financially. Income can, after all, ebb and flow
> somewhat across a financial year. (Imagine you work for a company that
> makes greetings cards. While birthday cards may keep the money coming
> in all the year round, you can expect to see big spikes at Easter,
> Christmas, Mother’s Day, etc.) So, when preparing accounts and
> budgets, accountants tend to take a company’s income for the year,
> subtract its expenses, and see what surplus profit is left over (or,
> if they’ve overspent, what the deficit is). Assuming this surplus
> isn’t given straight to the company’s shareholders as a dividend, it
> is carried over onto the balance sheet for the following year. Thus a
> company that has a surplus that it carries over is said to have that
> surplus ‘going forward’ from one year’s accounts to the next.
>
> This term has solidified into an adverbial phrase and acquired a more
> general sense meaning ‘in future’, ‘from now on’. But, you might say,
> in this use it scarcely counts as jargon: you gain no value from using
> ‘going forward’ compared to ‘from now on’. This is true: in fact, it’s
> a piece of jargon that has lost much of its technical sense. The
> technical sense is, of course, still widely used. You just don’t hear
> it, as you’d expect, outside the context of management accounting,
> where it carries on harmlessly.
>
> Alex
>
> 2009/5/21 Automatic digest processor <LISTSERV at listserv.uga.edu>:
>> Date: Â  Â Wed, 20 May 2009 09:57:52 -0400
>> From: Â  Â "Baker, John" <JMB at STRADLEY.COM>
>> Subject: Re: Going forward (was SCOTUS)
>>
>> Â  Â  Â  Â Business jargon, I think. Â I was pretty sure I heard and used it
>> before 2000, but couldn't say just when. Â  I did a few random searches
>> of news reports using the words "going forward," 20 reports per year for
>> selected years. Â I found 0/20 instances of this use in 1985, 2/20 in
>> 1990, 4/20 in 1995, and 12/20 in 2000. Â So, at some point in the late
>> 1990s, this became the dominant use of "going forward," at least in
>> printed news reports.
>>
>> Â  Â  Â  Â The earliest I saw was from 12/20/1984, in the Los Angeles News
>> Record (via Westlaw): Â "I see business as tough going forward for the
>> next several months." Â But I didn't try too hard, since there are so
>> many examples of "going forward" with other meanings.
>>
>>
>> John Baker
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
>> Of Randy Alexander
>> Sent: Wednesday, May 20, 2009 12:12 AM
>> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>> Subject: Going forward (was SCOTUS)
>>
>> On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 1:49 AM, Pat O'Conner
>> <mailbox at grammarphobia.com>wrote:
>>
>>> Going forward, please use BC-US--Supreme Court as the starting point
>>> for = the stories about the highest court."
>>>
>>
>> I first heard "going forward", meaning "from now on" when I was working
>> for Lehman Bros in 2000, and was very surprised by it. Â Has anyone
>> traced it?
>>
>> --
>> Randy Alexander
>> Jilin City, China
>> My Manchu studies blog:
>> http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu
>>
>
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