Revert, Meaning Get Back To

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Shreya Gardner. I’m calling from San Diego.

A fellow San Diegan. Welcome.

What’s up?

I work for a corporation, and in the last year I’ve been getting responses to scheduling emails that say, I’ll revert, or we’ll revert, meaning we’ll get back to you. And that seems really wrong to me.

Revert?

Yeah, it doesn’t have an object or anything? It’s just revert, period?

No, it’s just revert. I’ll say, for example, so-and-so has availability on the following dates and times. Please get back to me. Let me know what works for you. And they go, okay, we’ll check with so-and-so and revert.

Interesting.

And I’m like, revert back to what? That’s R-E-V-E-R-T, right?

Yeah.

Are your correspondents from the subcontinent, are they Indian perhaps or Bangladeshi or Pakistani?

They’re from New York and they’re almost all in banking.

Sorry.

No, that’s fine. It’s just interesting because most of the books that I know about world Englishes have revert and they have an entry and they mark it as being Indian. It’s one of these, at least in the subcontinent, it’s a holdover from several hundred years of British bureaucracy where this word lived on after the British themselves stopped using it in that way for the most part.

Yeah, well, it seems to me that you can only revert back to something that you already were, like the Hulk can revert back to Dr. Bruce Banner.

Nice.

Or I can revert back to my childish ways, but I can’t revert back to you. And it just means to get back to somebody. Like, if I revert to you, it means I’ll get back to you with an answer or a follow-up.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, it basically means I’ll get back to you, but it just seems wrong.

Wayne, that holds to the etymological history of this word. We got it from the French. I think it came into English a couple different times. It’s got hundreds of years of history. And over the years, its meaning has changed here and there. But almost always, there’s this really solid underlying meaning of go back, return, reciprocate, or reestablish, or just return to a previous state. And I think this use, as odd as it sounds, actually conforms really well to other meanings of the word over history.

Well, it’s really succinct. It reminds me of dun-dun-dun-dun-dun. You know?

Exactly. I’m like waiting for, I’m like, okay, what are you going to revert to? This could be interesting.

That’s awesome.

Yeah, they just basically mean, I mean, it sounds like it’s email shorthand for I’ll get back to you.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, and in that sense, I think it’s really efficient. It’s odd to my ear, but I bet if I were in your office, I would get used to it.

Well, I guess I’m old school. I’m not used to it.

I’m old school too.

Well, now I want to talk to your correspondents in New York City, and figure out where they learned it, and take this back down the tree of language and figure out how this is spreading, because I love it. It’s an innovation that I haven’t seen in the United States before.

Yeah, so Grant will do that, and then he will revert. And then we’ll revert.

Shreya, thank you for calling.

Thank you.

Thanks, Shreya.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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