In the future; “going forward.” One of several cases where the British delete the article favored by Americans, the most famous other one being in hospital. Also, the football teams Blackburn Rovers and (strangest of all, to American ears) Rangers.
Wes Davis alerted me to this passage from Charles Portis’s 1979 novel, The Dog of the South. Wes writes:
An American named Jack is helping some British soldiers load sandbags during a hurricane in Belize. When one of the Brit trucks gets stuck in the mud, Jack takes the wheel, claiming to know a special way to get a truck moving again. It doesn’t work. Here’s what comes next:
Jack said the gear ratios were too widely spaced in that truck. The young British officer, none too sure of himself before, pulled Jack bodily from the car and told him to stay away from his vehicles “in future”–rather than “in the future.”
But if the President now admitted a knowing falsehood, that admission would probably be admissible in evidence against him if in future he is prosecuted for perjury.(Anthony Lewis, New York Times, December 15, 1998)/If [Mickey] Hart should ever attempt to work with dancers again in future, he should consider consulting with [Jay] Cloidt. (The Bay Citizen, April 18, 2011)
This seems to be one of those classic dialect markers–it’s mutually intelligible, but the grammar of it (a function-word-class item, the article) is marked by its presence or absence in the two dialects. It has always struck me as a “foreign” expression, and suggests that what we call “the future” is somehow in British English a proper noun, comparable to saying “in Bromley.” Ironically, I don’t have the same reaction to “in hospital”–while I still find it foreign-sounding, I don’t reject it to the same degree, perhaps because we may say someone dying is “in hospice (care).”
Also Bolton Wanderers, and Wolverhampton Wanderers, known commonly as “Wolves.”
I have been using “in future” and wonder if it sounds too pretentious. Again, from the Bridget Jones books and other chick lit influences.