Continuing my quest to dig deep into the nuances of English language, there is another word that amuses me – ‘Prepone’
For those who hail form the country of Her Majesty, they would say its not a word… They would have heard postpone and will frown on the usage / meaning of such a word. Not surprisingly, while I am writing this blog, Mr Bill Gates creation fails to recognize this word and the spell check keeps showing an error. I myself have gone through many debates on this topic. Because for us who come from India, prepone is a very common and natural word to use.
The first time I heard of this word, I did a research on the global search engine (Google… I would love to write a blog on this as well but lets leave it for sometime in future). I found it very interesting to see that such a word doesn’t exist in the English dictionary. However, there were various links which acknowledged that such a word is indeed spoken in India and is classified under ‘Indian English’. One such link even claimed that the ‘New Oxford Dictionary of English’ and ‘Random House Unabridged’ have included this word with the origination as Indian English just like many other words originating from India like yoga, mantra, guru, jungle, karma, etc. But, I am yet to get an official confirmation on this. (By the way: there are a total of 350,000 words in English dictionary, out of which 700 are classified to be of Indian origins).
So without going further into the facts and the various versions/dictionary of English, let me just put my views.
To put it simply, if you can postpone something, why cant you prepone?
Sometimes I laugh off by saying that may be we know how to do things faster and hence can understand the relevance of such a word whereas others go strict by the project planning and if there is a deadline, it can only be ‘postponed’.
English has been a very flexible language with words taken from almost every other language and has thus incorporated words as per convenience. And hence, instead of using the more complicated versions existing today (‘to bring forward’, to advance, ‘to move up’), why don’t we just welcome ‘prepone’ into the English vocabulary as well?
May be we might learn to prepone things more than postpone them
Cheers!
2 comments:
Now that was a great pick. You are doing great on picking up topics for writing. Wish you had "preponed" this blog creation to years before *wink*
Nice one. Never realised that this was not a "valid" English word. Asked my colleagues around and they said they would rather move it up...
As you have mentioned, I too believe that the "Indian" upbringing also teaches us to do things quickly as well as by using less resources...
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