If you make no other gesture this day toward clarity and economy in prose, deleting ongoing will store up treasure for you in Heaven.
It has been a while--think of the late John Bremner forty-plus years ago--since anyone has denounced ongoing as a faddish and disagreeable substitute for continuing. It has sunk its roots deep into the journalistic vocabulary, where it continues to flower.
The irksome thing about the word is that it is in almost every instance unnecessary, a mere gesture from the writer that "I am au courant."
Look at the instances where you find it, places where you can be sure that your reader is already aware that things are going on: the public's ongoing concern over rising gasoline prices, the ongoing disputes over legislative redistricting, the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.
Ask yourself, is your reader so preternaturally dim as to be unaware that there is conflict today in the Middle East? And having framed that question for yourself, you know the inevitable answer: strike it out.
“Ongoing” is so often unnecessary. But trendy words do get accepted over time. I can’t imagine anyone saying now what Vermont Royster, the late editor of The Wall Street Journal once said: ''If I see upcoming in the paper again, I'll be downcoming and someone will be outgoing.''
ReplyDeleteSame goes for modifying a reference to two objects (or ideas, or qualities) with “both.” Your reader probably knows how to distinguish the singular from the plural without assistance.
ReplyDeleteThere are two issues here: is the word faddish, and is it unnecessary? Merriam-Webster dates the word to 1877. Access to a newspaper archive easily shows it is older. In the 19th century it was more often a noun than an adjective. The noun use has disappeared, but we still have "goings-on." In any case, the faddish argument is partially supportable. Both n-grams and newspapers.com show it to be a rare word until it takes off in the 1960s.
ReplyDeleteBut was it faddish, or newly popular? N-grams, which is based on uses in books, show it rising steadily into the early 2000s, then leveling off. Fads by their nature are fleeting. This is not a fad. The newspaper archive shows a similar rise in popularity, but with a clear peak around 2000 followed by a drop around 2017, leveling off at about half its peak. Still not a fad, but suggesting (with proper acknowledgement of the vagaries of the data sets) that editorial objections such as Mr. Bremner's suppressed its use.
He was wrong about its being faddish. Whether it is disagreeable compared with "continuing" is a personal esthetic reaction. I suspect it to be generational. Many find a usage being new-to-them sufficient reason to dislike it.
Whether it is unnecessary is situational. One can reasonably argue for striking it out in a specific instance while having no opinion about the word itself. To conflate the two questions is fuzzy thinking.