Linguistic Evolution - "Revert"

"There's an old saying about those who forget history. I don't remember it, but it's good." - Stephen Colbert

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On Language - Revert

Lynne Geyser writes: "My son and I are in disagreement concerning the use of the word revert. The only usage I find acceptable is 'to return to a previous state.' He uses it (and claims that his Bahamian/English friends use it) to mean 'to get back to someone.' That is, instead of saying, 'I will get back to you with that information or with respect to that issue,' they say, 'I will revert to you.' Can you shed some light on this?"

Revert, as the major American and British dictionaries have it, does indeed primarily refer to a return to a former condition, belief or practice. For instance, George Vecsey, a sports columnist for The New York Times, recently wrote of the woeful New Jersey Nets, "Jason Kidd, Kenyon Martin and Richard Jefferson reached the finals in 2002 and 2003, but the Nets have since reverted to their haunted roots."

Secondary senses of the verb include the legal one, denoting the return of something to its previous owner, as in the contractual boilerplate, "All rights revert to the author after publishing." In evolutionary biology, it can signal an atavistic throwback to an ancestral type. To someone familiar with only these traditional meanings of the word, "I will revert to you" might sound like a bizarrely personal take on either property law or genetics.

It turns out that unbeknownst to most dictionaries, revert has been leading another life in several varieties of world English, notably the kind spoken on the Indian subcontinent. The usage has finally garnered the attention of the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, which amended the definition of revert for its newly published eighth edition to include the meaning "to reply." Marked in the OALD as "Indian English," the use of the word is exemplified by the sentences: "Excellent openings - kindly revert with your updated CV," and "We request you to kindly revert back if you have any further requirements."

(Sticklers who are not already up in arms about this change in meaning will surely bristle at the redundancy of the second sentence: why revert back when you can simply revert? The same criticism can be leveled at reply back, with the superfluous addition of back resulting in "pleonasm," or the use of more words than is strictly necessary.)

As Alison Waters, a lexicographer at Oxford University Press, told The Indian Express, revert in the sense of "reply" is one of eight contributions from Indian English included in the latest batch of OALD additions. It has spread beyond India, however, cropping up in the English of Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong and elsewhere. In these countries, the usage has occasionally been deemed improper by language authorities. Singapore's Speak Good English Movement, for example, labels it "a mistake" that should be avoided in official correspondence.

Given the established use of revert in several Anglophone countries, often appearing in formal letter writing, it would be unfair to treat the "reply" meaning as simply erroneous. Paul Brians, an emeritus professor of English at Washington State University, previously catalogued revert in his online compendium of "Common Errors in English Usage." Alerted to its prevalence in South Asia, Brians recently revised the entry, while still recommending that "it is best to stick with 'reply' when dealing with non-South Asian correspondents." This is sound advice for now, but if Geyser's son and his friends are any indication, revert may be in the midst of a global shift from which there is no turning back.


Of course this won't matter to people who insist that, say, American English is wrong. But then we wouldn't be able to say that most of them were being hysterical.