Well, “have a good one” is clearly usually just a variation of the common phrase “have a good day,” which is itself a pretty empty expression.
Ah, but when you add “eh” (“Have a good one, eh?”) - beautiful.
Have a good one, eh, hoser?
[/Bob’n’DougMacKenzie]
You have to keep in mind how all-pervasive “Have a Good Day!”, or worse “Have a Nice Day!”, was in the 70s.
Chirped by every clerk everywhere, and on shirts worn by bubbly future-sorority-social-directors.
It was such a relief the first time I saw a “Have A Day” t-shirt…
And once or twice I’d cut off a chipper checkout chipmunk with “Don’t tell me what kind of day to have…”
You’re actually right–it does make it a wonderful thing!
Clean joke: You know how you spell “Canada” right?
C, eh! N, eh! D, eh!
Tripler
I’m probably going to hell for that.
Bah - all good.
“Canaduh”, though - that’s gotten tedious as all get out.
[George Carlin]“I’ve already got a good one. I’m looking for a longer one!”[/George Carlin]
I would give you an aneurysm. That’s my normal “sign off” when dealing with random customer service drones.
I also approve of “have a good one”. You may not know me or my schedule well enough to know what one I’ll be having, so I can’t take offense from any good wish.
If I were the lead singer of a rock and roll band, I don’t think I’d like being called the “front man”. Are they suggesting that I’m just a pretty face to show the public while the real talent labors in the shadows?
Is it just me or is “going forward” crummy?
::vacillating::
I don’t think that’s what they’re suggesting. I also don’t think that anyone means to evoke the other meaning of “front man” when they say it.
“Lead singer” and “front man” are not necessarily the same role, though they often are the same person. But I think of a band’s “front man” as the guy out in front, interacting with the crowd, when they’re on stage.
In concert, Mike Love was The Beach Boys’ front man in that sense, but they had several members who sang lead vocals. And Brian Wilson, who often didn’t tour with them at all, was the “real talent [who] labors in the shadows.”
I’m picturing a meeting where the CEO says “Now, going forward…”
I interrupt with “Are there other options where we’re not going forward?”
I just got a meeting invitation from the big boss:
"All,
Please join myself and the rest of the…"
AAAGGGHHH! Please join ME! ME, dammit! That grates on my (mental) ears so much.
Ahem. Carry on.
Are there other options where time reverses and we move into the past, not the future? I didn’t think so!
On the other hand, it’s kind of a softer formulation of “From now on we will …” or “Effective immediately we will …”
I also occasionally run across it in connection with the idea of “mistakes were made”. IOW, we acknowledge that thus-and-such happened that was bad, but we’re making changes so that won’t happen again. IOW, "Going forward we’ll do X [sotto voce] even though that’s not what happened last week and we’re soooo sorry. But not sorry enough to actually say in public what went wrong.[ /sotto voce]
Are you the customer responding to the drone? I think that’s okay, since that’s fighting fire with like fire.
Tripler
Just sayin’.
Not sure if this fits here, but “challenges” is getting used a lot these days to mean problems.
Using the word sort of implies that any problem is fixable if we have the right stuff and face it with steely fortitiude.
But when you say something like “our economy is presenting us with several new challenges”, the economy is not standing up and saying “Oh, so you think you can fix me, well I challenge you to try!”.
And it’s arrogant to suggest that pluck and luck are all we need to overcome any predicament. Death, for instance, isn’t a challenge, it’s a certainty.
Not disagreeing, but that brings up an interesting dilemma. “It is what it is” means we’re stuck with it. As you say, “challenge” implies it’s fixable.
So what happens when
PHB #1: We have a challenge with the TPS reports.
PHB #2: It is what it is.
Like crossing the streams, or the immovable object meeting the irresistable force, or Godzilla vs Rodan, the entire fabric of the universe may be rent asunder by the contradiction.
More seriously …
As a manager I admit to using “We have a challenge” a lot. The key words being “we” as in all of us, including me, have a role to play in the solution. And challenge, as in this situation has pushed us into a bad spot and we need to work back to a good spot. We have an unexpected atypical obstacle to overcome.
As I use it, it’s deliberately moving past “problem” or other words that imply someone or something went wrong and we care about blame or how we got here. Instead it’s all about starting from where we are with no concern for the prologue. We care only about getting the mess cleaned up and the train back on the rails and into motion.
Not that we can’t have a post mortem to avoid another instance of the same problem, but that’s a completely separate process undertaken on a different date with a different audience.
This one has bugged me a bit, but I’m only now just getting around to mentioning it:
Ridiculous. More to the point, when so many stress the first syllable with a punched long “e” sound. REEE-diculous and not the short “I” sound. Yes, in other languages, the letter “I” can take a long “e” sound, but not the neutral middle-america broadcast media type english tones I hear those who mispronounce the word ridiculous.
Hell, to my ears, to add emphasis to the word ridiculous, I think punching the second syllable works better anyhow.
I agree with all of that. Management needs to be optimistic and forward-looking. Framing problems as “challenges” means you’re focused on solutions. Even if a completely satisfactory solution isn’t possible, a constructive approach will at least come up with mitigation options or preventive learnings for the future.
I still chuckle when I think about a pretty good manager I worked for once, one of those guys who always had a smile and was a seemingly incurable optimist. I talked to him once about a big problem on our project. Naturally, his response was to cheerfully suggest various solutions. But I pointed out that things weren’t quite so simple, and presented more evidence, and then even more evidence, and then still more. Eventually, under this onslaught of negativity, I got this paragon of optimism to proclaim “we’re doomed!”. I was quite proud of that! 
BTW, it was only a momentary lapse. We both got back to optimism and eventually worked our way out of the “challenge”. The value of optimism is that it helps balance out the fact that problems often look worse than they really are when you’re in the thick of them.
I don’t have a history of pouncing and glomming onto phrases that can be used as half-dece aphorisms and such, but I think I’ll just pounce and glom anyway onto that pithy goodness.