Going Absolutely Forward

Words are one of the great gifts given by God to humanity. Words express, command, describe, and act to make unseen realities understood. They form the most basic building blocks of communication without which society would fall apart.

Like so many other things in our societies, however, they are also subject to the power of the fad. (For a fun little riff on living "fad-free," see our friend's entry of the same title.) Certain words become fads, used over and over again, ad nauseum, until the word serves less as a communication tool than as a distraction. Or, worse, the word's appearance becomes a signal that the words around it are self-consciously insufficient or deceptive; the fad-word has been thrown in to hide the futility of the ones next to it.

My generation, when it was younger, burned out the word "totally." In middle school we wore out "radical." The generation after me, in its adolescent years, is busy beating the dead horses of "wicked," "ill," "sick," and "whatever."

Right now the adults who get paid to put their voices on the radio waves and their faces on TV screens have two favorites that have begun to get distracting. The first is "going forward."

"Going forward" has become a tack-on for everyone from movie producers to presidents, who are "going forward" with production or a war in the mountains. Said enough times, the phrase makes one wonder why it has to be said. After all, aside from science fiction plot lines involving time machines, there are few arenas in which "going backward" is a positive goal.

Or perhaps "going forward" tries to answer the suspicion that really we're just at a standstill. Listen for it as you are going forward into your day.

The second is "absolutely." This four-syllable adverb (which part of speech, by the way, is sternly discouraged in most forms of formal written discourse) stands in the place of "Yes." After all, it is not enough to say, "Yes," right? "Yes" doesn't sound nearly definitive enough. We might not give the speaker sufficient gravity of trust if she said just "yes" to a question. I suspect "absolutely" junkies want to remove all doubt about what they are saying. Their observation or judgment is not enough; they want to squelch any possible qualification of their affirmative.

But we're human. So there are always qualifications to every "yes," aren't there?

Absolutely.

~ emrys