Wednesday 25 May 2011

Words and Phrases - it Should Go without Saying

'Learnings' is something I thought we'd seen the back of, thanks to Don Watson. Yet there was the prettiest minister in the Australian government (yes, I know the competition is far from fierce) bandying it about on the ABC's PM programme the other night. It has to stop. Also on that programme, there was a man who kept saying, 'We will be doing this going forward', 'We will be implementing new strategies going forward'. Unless somebody invented a time machine while I wasn't looking, there is nowhere else for any of us to go but forward, dragged along in the inescapable flow of time.

4 comments:

  1. Once, when I was a kid paying baseball, a teammate of mine was daydreaming in the outfield. The coach yelled, "Heads up." The kid looked up for a fly ball and got hit in the face with a line-drive. A case for specific language if there ever was one.

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  2. 'fly ball', 'line-drive', 'outfield', this is all getting very technical

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  3. "Learnings" seem to me a participle masquerading as a gerund. But somebody is on a book tour this week in Washington with a book on "Visionings", so Mr. Watson is not the only offender out there.

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