Monday, November 02, 2009

New pet peeve

Up among my favourite pet peeves (I have obsession problems) "ATM Machine" and "PIN Number", is the word "revert". For heaven's sake people, you do not use the word "revert" in the following context!

"please revert to me by email", "i will revert to you by email", "revert to us with your response please"

A definition from http://www.dictionary.com:

re⋅vert

–verb (used without object)
1. to return to a former habit, practice, belief, condition, etc.: They reverted to the ways of their forefathers.
2. Law. to go back to or return to the former owner or to his or her heirs.
3. Biology. to return to an earlier or primitive type.
4. to go back in thought or discussion: He constantly reverted to his childhood.
–noun
5. a person or thing that reverts.
6. Law. a reversion.

chet

2 comments:

Zoya said...

Glad to see that you reverted to blogging :-P

Greg said...

I have certainly noticed this turn of speech is the rule, not the exception, in natives of certain a certain (sub) continent.

My favourite was at the end of an email at work:

"Please do the necessary and revert"

Wait, if i'm going to revert I won't bother spending any time "doing the necessary" first.