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Glancing through Rediff earlier today, one came across this piece of news about the Sukhoi deal that the Indian government inked with Russia some years ago. Here is an excerpt from the said article.

According to Irkut Corporation President Oleg Demchenko, his company is ready to execute the fighter swap deal with India and is likely to pre-pone the execution of deal for the licensed production of 140 fighters by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited from 2014 to 2012.

Looking at the word, one finally understands the etymology of the word in question. The word prepone seems to have originated from the mistaken belief that the “post” part of the word “postpone” is a prefix, while it definitely is not. So the original users, surely non native speakers of English (in all probability of East Indian descent) of the word “prepone” just took the antonym, if I may say so, of the word “post” and used it to get a new word which supposedly means just the opposite of the word “postpone”. And voila, there you have it - Prepone. But given the poor knowledge of etymology that this blogger possesses, the origin of the word might have been invisible, if not for the inadvertent error made by the editor/correspondent.

Lest you, the kindly reader, think that this is a tirade against the use of the prefix “pre” with the non-existent word “pone”, take a step back. One is aware that the word “prepone” has been on dictionary.com for sometime now. Rather it is a tirade against the improper use of the hyphen where it shouldn’t be in the first place.

And BTW, a vibrant cell phone culture is no excuse to invent new words for mundane activities like “paying the bill”. I don’t think “post-pay” has any place in our vocabulary as well. Paying dues to a company after using their services is a process that has been in vogue in business for eons. But paying before you use a service - now that is something new, well sort of. So one thinks that you are allowed to develop words like “pre-pay”.

In fact there should be an official limit on people cooking up new words. At least no one except Stephen Colbert should be allowed to invent new words. Now that is a thought that is overflowing with truthiness!

This entry was posted on Friday, June 16th, 2006 at 11:21 am and is filed under Life.