“Please revert to me at the earliest.”

How many times have you come across emails or telephone conversations that ask you to revert to someone? And how many times have you yourself asked somebody to revert? Did anyone, ever, consider looking the word up in the dictionary, just to check if it indeed means what you think it does? I can bet my life that no one did. Because if you did, this is what you'd find in the dictionary:

Revert, therefore, is clearly not a synonym for reply, contrary to popular (Indian) belief! But, now that we have seen the dictionary meaning of the word, let us take a relook at the sentence mentioned at the beginning of this post. What do you think would it mean to revert to someone else? Were you that person earlier, and somehow managed to magically transform yourself into your present form?

I hear the word “revert” being misused numerous times every day. By friends. By my bosses. By the lady who sits right across my desk in office. By the guy from the marketing department - an MBA graduate from a premier B-school - who comes to me with project requirements. By people who would, otherwise, speak and write flawless English! What is even more distressing is that I found one of my wife’s colleagues – an English teacher at a well-known international school - asking for a revert in one of her emails!

It is baffling that in a country that has capitalised its economy based on its substantial educated English-speaking population to become a major global exporter of services, such malapropism has managed to creep into routine Indian-English! The English language has absorbed words from cultures across the world, and while Indian languages have had their fair share of contribution – from Hindi-inspired avatar and juggernaut (which happens to originate from Lord Jagannath's chariot!) to catamaran (from Tamil kattumaram) and mongoose (from Marathi mangus) that originated from regional languages – I doubt if there are too many other instances of assigning a new meaning to an existing English word!

When I joined my first job back in 2005, nobody ever asked me to revert! It is only in the last few years that I have noticed my compatriots growing increasingly fond of this word. How and where it all started is difficult to figure out. When I asked this question to a colleague, she said she had no idea about the origin of this usage, but had started using revert after seeing her friends and team members do so. She felt that asking people to revert sounded more formal and polite instead of asking them to reply or respond. Now, in my decade-long career, I have worked with American, Australian, British, Danish, Polish and Norwegian customers. And believe you me, not one of them ever felt offended when I asked them for a reply! There is absolutely nothing informal or impolite about asking somebody to respond to an email! But then, aren’t we Indians known to take our politeness levels to the extreme, especially in official matters! (Remember “What is your good name?”. I mean, how many evil names have you ever come across in your life?)

Almost every day I receive emails asking me to revert. While I try and respond to all of them, I have never tried regressing evolutionarily to whatever primitive state I might have evolved from! However, it looks as if even the authorities have relented! The Oxford Dictionary has now included an entry for this “new meaning” of the word revert, while noting its Indian-English origin. But that will, believe me, not prevent your non-Indian friends, colleagues and customers from misunderstanding your (ab)usage of the word.

So friends, please start responding and stop reverting! You can most definitely revert your software’s source code to an earlier version! But to emails and questions, you must reply and not revert. However, the extent to which the new meaning of this word has become an integral part of our daily parlance, I doubt it will ever be reverted!

I had originally posted this article on LinkedIn on July 25, 2015.

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