Ban "going forward."

I am a fierce advocate of free speech, and the thought of banning words or speech irks me to the highest degree, but if I would ever make an exception, it would be for the term often used by politicians and athletes, which is the dreadful "going forward."

The great writer George Orwell detested the popular double negative: "He is not unlike his brother," or "She is not unfriendly to the prince's advances." Get rid of the 'not.' He is like his brother, she is friendly to the prince's advances.

But this pales in comparison to going forward. The baseball players hits 100 home runs in the regular season and then gets caught with a pharmacy of performing enhancing drugs in his system. He states: "I will take the lessons I've learned and apply them going forward."

Why in Pete's sake do you need the going forward? You don't. It's a redundancy, and an extremely irritating one at that. "I will take the lessons I've learned and apply them." He can't apply them going backward, unless he has a time machine. The mere act of applying them means from that point on.

Politicians use this term all the time. It's like a virus which has afflicted huge swaths of these people. "We'll work on the economy going forward."

I'm continuing to write this blog going forward.