Don’t “Prepone”

It’s amazing how languages develop. Look at english. Even if it is originated in England, it now has spread all across the globe and has undergone multitudes of changes. In fact, every region which speaks English has its own specialties, its own words, its own phrases. To explain you this I will give two examples, both told to me by Sidscope, occured in Lehman Brothers.

The first one is related to a phrase or rather “greeting”. Many people have a habit of saying,“What is your good name?” Sidscope’s colleague was chatting with his Japanese counter part and he started of by saying the same thing, “What is your good name, Sir?”. Well, the Japanese got angry and replied, “Do you think all Japanese names are bad?” His colleague had tough time explaining the Japanese guy that it was normal in India to ask this question as a symbol that the other person name, whatever it may be, is good.

Second example was kind of shocker to me. It was about a word which I have used so many times in my life. This time the British were involved. Sidscope and his team in India usually has(sorry, they used to have) a meeting with the team in London. One day, due to some reason they had to schedule their meeting from evening to early morning. This was conveyed to the Indian team via Tele-conference. The Brit asked these people make a change in their calendar to forward the meeting time to 10 o’clock. So, one person from the Mumbai team said, “Ok, then. We will prepone the meeting to 10 o’clock.” The Brit replied with the same lines he had said about forwarding the time. The whole was repeated once or twice, and finally the British guy said in frustrated voice, “If that is the ‘word’, then do it”. These people really were surprised by his tone, until they found that “prepone” doesn’t exist in Oxford english dictionary. When Sidscope told me this story, I wasn’t really able to believe him. I went home, checked the dictionary myself, and what you know, it really isn’t there. It does exist in word web dictionary, but is marked as a “Asian Usage” word. Even now, I can see the red lines below the word prepone in this post which I writing using Live Writer.

So next when you meet an English guy, never say “prepone” again.