Going forward, let’s drop the ugly speech

WHY do people call the Royal Christmas broadcast ‘the King’s Speech’? It isn’t a blinking speech. The King’s Speech is the thing he reads to the Lords and Commons at the State Opening of Parliament.

Yet, since a few years ago, almost everyone uses this mistaken name for it. I blame that dreadful, falsehood-crammed, historically wrong and annoying film The King’s Speech. Its effects have spread into the language and into public opinion, like mildew. How do these things happen? All my life, for instance, you committed yourself to a goal or task. This was what we called a reflexive verb.

Then, a few years ago, without any reason given, politicians started saying that they were going to ‘commit’ to something, without the reflexive pronoun. And nobody pulled them up, or even noticed.

To me, this always sounds ugly and lame. But how did it happen? About the same time all our railway stations became ‘Train Stations’, an expression from America where there are hardly any trains and even fewer stations for them to stop at.

So why? And why are nouns now used as verbs (or ‘verbed’, as they say)? On Friday I heard a broadcaster use ‘foreground’ as a verb. Let me also foreground this: when and why was every new government policy announcement treated like the unveiling of a new aircraft, and ‘rolled out’?

And what is the origin of the insane phrase ‘going forward’ which suddenly pops up in midsentence and always makes me wonder if the speaker has been taken over by some alien force?

Often the culprits are educated, literate people who know, or at least knew, these things were ugly.