Spanspek

I just heard National Party politician Ian Macfarlane on the radio claiming that:

The mining industry is now in jeopardy in terms of its future going forward.

Gee, I'm glad it's not going backward. And if it were, what would that look like? Or maybe he means that its future is going forward... not that one could do otherwise when moving from the past to the future, so it's barely worth mentioning.

And the jeopardy is in terms of the future. WTF?

Listen people, it's time to stop abusing the phrase "in terms of". Let me give you a correct example:

"Our business is successful in terms of turnover, but less so in terms of profit."

In other words, we're using the measures of turnover and profit to give use an indication of the success of the business. Whatever follows the phrase "in terms of" tells you something about whatever precedes it.

But abuses like Macfarlane's are meaningless: "its future going forward" says nothing about the mining industry or its supposed jeopardy. What he should have said was something like, "In the future, the mining industry will be in jeopardy". If you can state that any more clearly, then feel free to comment.

One would have thought that in order to reach a high public office, one would have to be functionally literate. Apparently not.

The only reason any of you use "in terms of" like that or say "going forward" when you mean "in the future" or "from now on" is because you've heard someone else say it. For young people, the same thing applies to "my bad". What exactly is it of yours that is bad? It's a fucking adjective—there's supposed to be a noun following it.

Have you notice that they're all egregious Americanisms?

Look, if you continually pepper your speech with meaningless cliches, you're making me work harder to figure out what it is you mean. I'm a sound guy. I care about signal-to-noise ratio. Modern speech has too much noise and not enough signal.

Oh, and before you launch a tirade bitching about how no one understands you, stop and consider that maybe it's because you can't even string two words together in a coherent sentence.