Monday, August 16, 2010

Our inaugural overused phrase: moving forward


I hear it all the time. Politicians use it, as in, "We are moving forward with our economic stimulus plan." Managers of professional sports teams often drop the MF bomb in press conferences, as in, "He's our starting quarterback moving forward." Life coaches and self help gurus take it to the bank. And Toyota has even adopted it as their tagline. But what does it mean? I'm not sure... It seems as though in most cases it's an attempt to put some sort of hyper-positive spin on whatever topic is on the table.


Below is some data we pulled from a noted national news publication. You can also examine the the trendline and data plotted on the chart above. As you can see, the rate of use of "moving forward" has been increasing steadily. In the years between 1990 and 1999 we saw average of 250.2 uses per month. This increased to 383.7 when we analyzed the years between 2000 and 2009. In fact, 2009 was a record year with 512 uses of moving forward. And so far in 2010, we have seen 373 uses which puts us on a record shattering pace of 559.5 moving forward.


year........ # "moving forwards"
1990........ 231
1991........ 187
1992........ 197
1993........ 205
1994........ 239
1995........ 225
1996........ 261
1997........ 261
1998........ 342
1999........ 354
2000........ 375
2001........ 445
2002........ 432
2003........ 437
2004........ 486
2005........ 502
2006........ 459
2007........ 470
2008........ 486
2009........ 512
2010........ 373

(data collected from noted national news publication on 08/14/2010)

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