Er.
In preparation for landing, I’ve had a lot of correspondence from home recently. And the one trend I’ve noticed is the flagrantly abusive misuse (superlatives much?) of the word “revert”. As in:
XYZ company says: “Thank you for your email.
We will be reverting to you on your enquiry / booking as soon as possible.”
Even my mother is like, “Pls revert” in her email messages to me.
So I’m like, wtf. And I go looking on MerriamWebster.
Main Entry: re·vert
1 : to come or go back (as to a former condition, period, or subject)
2 : to return to the proprietor or his or her heirs at the end of a reversion
3 : to return to an ancestral type
And its synonym? Regress.
No smart-ass observations on how this might be a Freudian-slip type remark on the state of the country in general. Please. FFS. Make it stop already! I want a reply. A response. But certainly not a reversion.
Maybe I’ll put that in my email signature.
This entry was posted on Monday, January 5th, 2009 at 9:29 pm and is filed under Guest Blogging, The Eeenglish Police. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
January 6th, 2009 at 1:16 am
LOL…never noticed that before. I hope the trend doesn’t catch on
January 7th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
I think must check to see if the Brits use it. Might be one fler who went to engerland and learnt it and came back with the bad habit. But as a general rule, Msian business communicatives are chock full of BS language.
January 7th, 2009 at 6:28 pm
Whaddaya know, it’s been observed across the Straits of Johor…