Accelerate your future with us

It's the season again! What am I talking about? It's the time when all local tertiary institutions start their promotion and getting students to join their institutions through organising open houses and whatnot. Recently I have really been seeing such posters everywhere. Including NUS's of course.

Anyway, moving on to the word of the day~ it is the word accelerate! I thought it was rather unusual to use accelerate along with future. Random images began appearing in my mind as to how the future could be accelerated. It sounded a little like future was a solid block X on wheels and it could be made to go faster by.. erm maybe something like a mini turbo engine, in this case MDIS?


Okay let's just refer to the OED definitions to start off.

accelerate, v.
1. trans. a. To quicken, or add to the speed of (a motion or process).
b. To quicken (anything) in motion or process. To increase the speed of (a railway train, motor-car, motor-engine, etc.); also absol. (cf. sense 3).
2. a. To hasten the occurrence of (an event); to bring it nearer, by quickening intervening processes, or by shortening the interval.
3. intr. To add to one's speed, to increase in speed, or become swifter.

And an additional sense:

trans. Educ. (orig. and chiefly N. Amer.). To advance (a student or group of students) through a course of study more rapidly than is usual, esp. because of exceptional ability. Also intr. (of a student, etc.): to make comparatively rapid progress in this way.


I omitted some senses which are not so relevant to the current discussion. Well, looking through the senses, 2a seems to be the most adequate in describing the situation we have here. The quotations provided by the OED are not that current though. I wonder why.

Just to list one quotation,
1662 FULLER Worthies (1840) III. 68 Change of air and diet..are conceived to have accelerated his death.


This does makes things clearer. So basically accelerate can be used to describe bring a certain event X closer, by fast-forwarding the middle components and reaching the goal, as it were. Then again, event X in the OED quotations are things which are rather clear, such as death, departure, day. (why do they happen to begin with D?)

But taking event X to be the future is rather vague? I mean, what does the future mean? It could be 3.5 seconds later, 4 days later or even 10 years later. In fact, with every millisecond, we are advancing into the future. So what does it really mean to accelerate the future..?

Yes I get the idea that the message is trying to say something along the lines of "You can get the future that you wished for faster by joining us". By the way, Google has more than 9 million search results for 'accelerate the future'. Not all consist of the exact phrase though.


However, somehow I feel that 'accelerating into the future' sounds more appropriate.

Just my thoughts. Feel free to disagree. =p