Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Live argument on ‘prepone’

In one of my earlier posts “Can we prepone a meeting” I suggested the usage ‘advance’ in place of ‘prepone’ since there is no such word in English. One of the readers argued against this.

With all respect to the reader I stand my ground. The general argument is that why this word can’t be added to English. It can be added but still I will be using the correct word ‘advance’ because English is not only for locals whom we converse with. I understand that this word is originated from India. When put it across to a native English speaker you can see the baffling look on his face.

It is not appropriate to compare ‘prepone’ with the word ‘googled’. Google is a relatively new phenomenon and a word is now derived by a section to express ‘searching something on google’. English is not starved for a word to ‘bring something forward’. We have the right word ‘advance’ for this.

The word ‘prepone’ originated from sheer ignorance.

I also read an argument in another blog why not ‘prepone’ if we can use prefix, prerequisite, prepaid, pre KG, preposition and preproduction.

Here as well, there is a clear difference. In each of those words, ‘pre’ is added to an existing meaningful word as a prefix.

‘Prepone’ could have been a meaningful word which would position itself as an antonym to postpone if we had a meaningful word ‘pone’ which would probably mean ‘to hold’ ‘to condut’ or ‘to organize’. Unfortunately, ‘postpone’ is a single word which is not derived by suffixing post to ‘pone’. Thus prepone cannot be its opposite number.

When we use English, why not we try to use it correctly so that the native English speakers won’t be baffled?