Erik Deckers
As a writer, I appreciate the English language.
I’ve spent a lifetime studying it, uncovering its history, and learning to appreciate all the things that make it the most rage-inducing, make-me-want-to-set-someone’s-hair-on-fire language on the planet.
But I’m not that picky about how you use language.
I won’t correct you for making mistakes or tell you how to use it.
I get tired of people apologizing to me for making a mistake in how they speak or write, like I’m a priest, and they said a bunch of swear words.
Look, I’m not the Grammar Whisperer. I don’t care whether you misuse language, and I won’t judge you.
Out loud. I won’t judge you out loud.
But if you say “less” when you mean “fewer,” I’m taking you off my Christmas card list.
I’m also not one of those language nostalgists who yearn for the good old days when you couldn’t end your sentences in a preposition (you can, and I’ll fight you over it). And I don’t recite the chants to summon my 7th-grade English teacher about why I’ll never start a sentence with “Hopefully.”
Just because we used to write something a certain way doesn’t mean we have to keep doing it. We stopped using leeches to cure illness, so we can stop with rules about splitting infinitives.
So, I will start sentences with a conjunction. I will end sentences with prepositions. And I will proudly use the singular “they.”
Although I refuse to accept that “literally” now means “not literally,” no matter what Google’s dictionary says.
But there are certain aspects of the English language that will figuratively drive me up a wall.
I’m talking about corporate jargon or corporate bull… well, a word that this newspaper will not print. But you know what it was, so just pretend I said it.
For example, I have never been a fan of the phrase “going forward” because it’s a stupid way of saying “from now on.”
And someone made it much worse when they called it “on a going-forward basis.”
But I nearly set a guy’s hair on fire when he said, “On the go forward.”
“What does that even mean?” I said, reaching for my lighter.
He said, “From now on.”
“Then say that.”
I recently read about a poll done by Glassdoor.com, the job search platform, about the most annoying phrases used in the corporate world.
They listed several irritating phrases regularly uttered by corporate bros and MBAs — mouth-breathing jerks — and over 600 people voted on the worst of the worst.
They finally settled on the three biggest offenders, held another round of voting, and found the number one worst phrase in Corporate America.
Coming in at No. 3, with 31% of the votes, was, “Let me circle back with you,” which means, “Let me get back to you,” or “I’ll look into it and forget about it in three days.”
No. 2, with 33% of the votes, was the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard — remember, I heard someone say “on the go forward” with a straight face: “Let’s double-click on that.”
When I first encountered that, I thought, “What’s wrong with that? That’s what you say when you’re helping someone use their computer, right?”
Wrong.
It means, “Can you please expand on that and explain it further?” And according to the Wall Street Journal, it’s the fastest-growing corporate cliché of the year.
Fast-growing like a fungus.
It’s a corporate fungus that has infected most corporate bros, turning them into mindless zombies who shuffle along through life, consuming everything in sight for the sake of profit.
Wait, they’re actually like that. Nevermind.
But, the phrase that Glassdoor community members — Glassdoorks? — picked as the worst, with 36% of all the votes, was “We’re building the plane as we fly it.”
I rolled my eyes so hard they spun like cylinders in a slot machine.
I have so many questions. Like, who is stupid enough to get on a plane that wasn’t even built? How did you even climb in? And how did it get airborne in the first place? Did it start out as a car and you played Dukes of Hazzard?
Did you just get on a non-built, non-flying plane by accident? Or did you say, “Say, that looks terribly unsafe and like it will kill us all; let’s go for a ride?”
I understand the sentiment of the phrase. It means nobody really thought this plan through, so we’re making it up as we go along. Which is not a great strategy for running a major corporation and making decisions worth millions of dollars.
As a piece of corporate jargon, it’s truly one of the dumbest things you could say.
Please, oh please, stop saying this… on the go forward.
