"latest" means "the most recent" must be strictly British English, Australian, etc. -- because we never talk like that in North America.
Why not use an unambiguous term that is understood everywhere, such as "newest"? You suggested "most recent", and that is also a good one.

Precision of expression! What a good concept! It is always far better than vagueness.
D.A.W.

Some verbs with "contact", in alphabetical order:

break contact, continue contact, establish contact, forsake contact, get in contact, keep in contact, make contact, permit contact, seek contact, strive for contact.

Maybe you can find some here that you can use.
D.A.W.

Alas, we need to go into the realm of science and technology again: "to get in contact with" is mostly a phase from telecommunications, and especially from radio communications. It probably spread from there into telephone communications, and perhaps from there into other fields. Here is an example that I just made up:
An amateur radio operator in New South Wales in 1912 astonished everyone he knew when he was able to get in contact with other radio operators in Ontario and Quebec.

"To get in contact with" is also a less formal version of "to establish contact with".

"To get in contact with" can also be a momentary thing, and that was a salient fact in shortwave radio communications, especially back before about 1943.

"To keep in contact with" is something that extends over a significant period of time, and that is something that is more difficult to do, and especially in radio communications back before about 1943, also. For example, the Department of the Navy in Washington, D.C., had difficulty keeping in contact with its base at Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

Actually, that is a historical fact, but it has puzzled me. Even before the 1940s, there already was an underwater telegraph cable from California to the Philippines, and it went via Oahu, Midway Island, Wake Island, and Guam. Why didn't the Department of the Navy just sent telegrams to Pearl Harbor instead of radiograms, considering that the atmospheric conditions were poor for radiograms that weekend? The Navy should have had A-1 priority on using that telegraph line.

Watch out! Some people get confused. Long distance telephone communications are a lot more difficult than telegraph, and the first telephone cable from the U.S. to England was not completed until 1956. Then the first transpacific phone cable was not completed until 1964, and it connected California, Hawaii, Guam, and Japan.

If you ever read about Roosevelt and Churchill talking with each other across the Atlantic during 1940 - 45, that was a two-way radio connection, and not an underwater cable. The signal was supposed to be scrambled, but sometimes the Germans were able to listen in anyway. They had figured out how to descramble the signal.
D.A.W.

"As per" is also used by would-be chrome domes who do not know "according to" or "considering", such as in
"according to our firm plans" and "considering our well-made plans".

To people who use "as per plan", that has the so-called "advantage" of being vague -- saying nothing about whose plan or what kind of a plan.

Remember that there are millions and millions of people who, given the choice of something specific or something vague, will choose the vague statement every time.

In contrast, I had English teachers in high school who told us, "be specific," "be specific," "be specific." That is very wise advice for writing or speaking.
D.A.W.

I believe that I have heard Australians overusing "as per", also.
In the case of "as per", overusing means using it at all!
D.A.W.

I agree: "Sometimes used to make the statement sound more important, give it more gravitas. Usually indicates lack of proper thought to me!",

but my sentence for it is that people who use "as per" are trying to sound like "chrome domes".

Definition: "Chrome dome" - someone who has an overinflated opinion of his own importance. I think that "chrome dome" originally referred to certain generals in the Air Force and admirals in the Navy because of the fancy hats that they wear -- with lots of metallic decorations. Oh, General MacArthur of the U.S. Army and Field Marshall Montgomery of the British Army definitely were chrome domes, too.

The phrase "chrome dome" has spread also to senators, members of the cabinet (American, British, Canadian, etc.), high-ranking professors at universities, et cetera.
As for senators, note that there are Federal senates in the United States, Canada, Australia, and probably more countries. Hence, senators abound.
In the United States, nearly all of the state governments have senates, too, and some of the senates in the large states have chrome domes, too: California, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas.
Nebraska has a unicameral legislature (unique!), and all of its members are senators.

D.A.W.

In statements like these about "topography", the writers are just trying to give the impression of being "chrome domes" and using polysyllabic (four syllables) scientific words instead of the common and simple words that everyone understands. AnWulf made the excellent sugestion of "terrain" (two syllables).

[I do think that millions of people are NOT widely-read, but rather they just pick out polysyllabic words from word lists and dictionaries. They just ignore short words like "terrain" and "about", and they want to use polysyllabic words like "topography", "topology", and "approximately". They do it, too. None other than Sir Winston Churchill spoke out against this.]

"Flat terrain" is a fine and meaningful phrase.
"High terrain" is useless in this context because it has a really different meaning.

To describe opposites of near opposites of flat terrain, we already have these, in alphabetical order:
hilly terrain, mountainous terrain, rolling terrain, and rugged terrain
such as in "the rugged terrain of the Ardennes" and "the rolling terrain of Missouri".

High terrain is found in places that are a long way above sea level, but are not necessarily mountainous (e.g. plateaus). Much high terrain is found in Tibet, Peru, Bolivia, Bavaria, Montana, Wyoming, Alberta, and in central Antarctica, where the South Pole is located at about 3,000 meters above sea level, but the land around it is quite flat..
Be careful! When I mentioned Bavaria, Bolivia, Montana, etc., I did not mean 100 percent of those places, but rather most of their areas.
D.A.W.

Some of you are having trouble with the word "always".
"Language is NOT always evolving and changing."

"Always" means every year, every week, every day, every hour, and every minute.

If the English language were always changing, then whatever was said or written just ten years ago would be practically Sanskrit by now.
None of the speeches of Winston Churchill or Franklin D. Roosevelt would make any sense now. As for the writings of Dickens, Wells, David Hume, Locke, Lincoln, Jefferson, Paine, and Franklin, they would be lost to all of us except for a few experts at universities..

This would be what it would mean if the language was ALWAYS changing.

In reality, ever since the times of the British and American Enlightenment, the English language has been remarkably stable.
Oh, "stable". Now I have brought up another mathematical concept.
D.A.W.

I stand corrected: NotAGrammarSnob is a woman. (I used "he" as the generic pronoun for a person of unknown sex.) In my case.my mother was a professional high school English teacher, and lots of that rubbed off on (disconcerting some of my friends, too). Then when it came to my own career, I have been a teacher, too, during a lot of years, but in electrical engineering and in mathematics. I have taught EE up through the senior level in the U.S. (and lots of it) and math up through the junior level (occasionally). Most of my math teaching has been at the freshman and sophomore levels.

By the way, some people with outrageous humor have speculated that the lone barber in Bertrand Russell's English village was a WOMAN! So the answer to "who shaves the barber" is "nobody". However, that speculation was a evasive and humorous one -- because Dr. Russell clearly intended for the barber to be a man all along.

The contradiction is that the barber could not shave himself because then he would be shaved by the barber. Likewise, the barber could not be shaved by the barber because then he would be shaving himself. All of this is an exercise in English, but it has deep implications in logic and mathematics. These really are all connected.
D.A.W.

You ought to read a lot about advances in the understanding of the relationships between language, mathematics, and science. A whale of a lot of progress was made during the 20th Century. Start with the carefully though out writings of Bertrand Russell, of course.

Next, progress to the writings and the mathematical explanations originated by Claude Shannon of the United States -- which began during the 1940s and then progressed into the '50s and '60s. Caution: I think that many Britons dislike Shannon automatically because he was an Irish-American, even though he was born in Michigan and he did much of his work in Massachusetts at M.I.T.

Finally, with enough guts and perserverance, you could progress into the writings of Noam Chompsky, who was from different department at M.I.T. Of these three, Chompsky is the only one who remains alive.

Spouting off with your unfounded opinions in an argumentative way is no way to live.
Others have already attacked the same subjects carefully and thoroughly.
D.A.W.