target

target

1. The figurative use of target meaning ‘an amount or objective to be achieved’ arose during the Second World War and is now more common than the primary meaning. Sir Ernest Gowers, the senior Whitehall civil servant and writer on language, grew rapidly tired of the word:

• We were offered a great variety of things that we might meritoriously do to our targets. We might reach them, achieve them, attain them or obtain them; we were to feel greatly encouraged if we came in sight of the target to which we were trying to do whatever we were trying to do, and correspondingly depressed if we found ourselves either a long way behind it or (what apparently amounts to the same thing) a long way short of it —ABC of Plain Words, 1951.

While care should be taken to avoid contexts that are jarringly incongruous (such as keeping abreast of targets, perhaps), the physical image is less strong than it is (for example) with ceiling, and Gowers' strictures now seem somewhat obsessive. To complain, as some do, that a doubled target is larger, and therefore necessarily easier to hit rather than harder, smacks strongly of pedantry. Used with care, target has a useful role alongside alternatives such as aim, goal, object, and objective.

2. The verb, meaning ‘to single out as an object of attack’, has inflected forms targeted, targeting.