What is mission creep? Where does the phrase come from?

Mission creep is when an original plan or objective is progressively widened by events on the ground.

Significantly the phrase has military origin

Originating in Somalia in 1993, the modern term “mission creep” became part of official U.S. Army vocabulary a decade later. Field Manual 3-07, Stability Operations and Support Operations (February 2003) acknowledges two types of mission creep. The first occurs when “the unit receives shifting guidance or a change in mission for which the unit is not properly configured or resourced.” Lewis and Clark

In other words limited objective you start with expands to the point where it is no longer clear.

Mission creep has also been used to describe non-military matters - financial regulation for example.

The Dictionary of Military Terms

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Which countries do not have an official language?

According to Henry Hitchings Language Wars (2011) these nations do not currently have an official primary language:

Why is English not the official language of England?

58 countries list English as an official language - but not the UK.

What is 'concept creep'?

Concept creep a term coined to describe 'psychology's expanding concepts of harm and pathology'.
by applying concepts of abuse, bullying, and trauma to less severe and clearly defined actions and events, and by increasingly including subjective elements into them, concept creep may release a flood of unjustified accusations and litigation, as well as excessive and disproportionate enforcement regimes. The concepts of abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice ... {have been subjected to historical changes}. In each case, the concept's boundary has stretched and its meaning has dilated. SourceThis trend towards a very broad definition of what constitutes 'harm' has been particularly pronounced on university campuses in the USA and - to a lesser extent - in the UK.

See Conor Friedersdorf's Atlantic essay, 'How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm'

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