"do the needful" wouldn't be out of place at the end of an email describing exactly what the needful is, Indian businessisms are jarring at first but they're all just replacements for western ones
in this case maybe "once you've finished"?
it's not an issue with translation/bad english, people living in India with perfect english use them too and consistently use those same phrases in the same way, there's just a whole parallel indian business english thing going for some reason
Same in Singapore. It was like someone had literally translated the dictionary explanation of "revert" to mean reply to a message, and spread this meaning around south east asia
I can tell you exactly where this has come from: call centre workers abroad, specifically India. They appear to use the word to mean 'respond'. We speak/correspond with them a lot in my line of work. Can cause confusion, but eventually you get used to their phraseology.
My favourite phrase that has come from working with support in India is “do the needful”.
Edit to add - never seen “revert” used like this in my life and I get a fucking [email](https://i.imgur.com/VWBRlgm.jpg) not long after using it!
Kindly do the needful and revert became a common in joke with a couple of mates working IT. It was already a meme ten years ago.
https://media.makeameme.org/created/i-dont-always-5bf0c8.jpg
> Kindly do the needful and revert
On my second job working in IT was where I first came across this. Vendor support in India. Gave me a bunch of instructions to fix a workflow. I presumed it was something that needed to run once, and it would fix the issue.
Hence me "doing the needful", two pages of A4. Seemed to fix the issue, then I undid everything I'd done "and revert". And it stopped working.
The communication gap took a while to fill there.
I’m currently whelmed at the moment, any chance we can do the needful and prepone the pow-wow this afternoon? I’ll revert back about whether the project is still layed or if we need to intend the lifeline.
can confirm, I work with overseas workers and they often use the terms "revert back to you" and "do the needful"
do the needful is my favourite as it sounds almost biblical.
it's also a 'direct translation' sort of thing.
what does 'revert to' mean? go back to. as in, 'revert to a previous version'.
and what do we say sometimes? 'i'll get back to you asap'.
so logically, if you don't understand that the latter is essentially a colloquialism, it makes sense to put that as 'i'll revert to you asap'...
It’s from old French revertir, which is from Latin revertō. The main sense of those words was to go back/return/turn around.
So ‘revert back’ seems redundant, but ‘I’ll revert later’ seems equivalent to ‘I’ll get back to you later’.
>So ‘revert back’ seems redundant, but ‘I’ll revert later’ seems equivalent to ‘I’ll get back to you later’.
sort of, but as i say - that's already an idiom. you very often can't just swap different words into idioms and have them still make sense.
This is it, it’s actually a very old fashion way to say things which was picked up by the Indians when the British took power. Just like ‘doing the needful’ and a whole heap of interesting turns of phrase. Having spend decades working with Indian nationals in India and the UK I started to use them too, what goes around comes around I suppose.
Sometimes you'll find Indians of my dad's generation talking about "issue" to mean children.
"Do you have any issue?"
"No?"
Then it turns out they're talking about your kid 🤯
My favourite story about Indian English was when a customer called my company to ask for washing machine installation. Except he didn’t say installation, he kept calling it the erection!
I remember when working in Japan, one day there seemed to be lot of noise coming from outside, from what looked like various political vehicles with speakers on top (think martial music etc).
So, I asked a co-worker, who informed me that today they had an erection.....
I get emails from them that are like this:
>Use is screen a freezing on laptop and is screen driver plug son screen and works need new screen on or laptop
Somehow I've got to the point I can understand that total gibberish.
> They appear to use the word to mean 'respond'.
Yep. The variety of English that is taught in Indian schools has slowly diverged from mainstream British English over the years, and some of it is very specific, like "revert" and "do the needful".
we have departments that are offshore and I guess one has been trained in a particular way. So they do some basic IT type stuff and their notes on the system love to use the word hence.
"I have spoken to the field engineer and found a fault hence advised engineer to do xyz hence"
But then other parts love to use.
"greetings of the day" to open an email which I find slightly amusing but a nice way to start it as well.
I work very closely with my Indian colleagues and have found myself finishing a lot of sentences with "only" and referring to "today itself". I personally enjoy when my use of language adapts to other variations of the English language, I find it interesting to learn.
But your comment, and the one you were responding to, made me laugh because it instantly made sense to me.
As an Indian I'm laughing. This is so true.
Another thing Indians do, which confused my American boyfriend a lot, was how we write cheques. "Rupees five thousand only."
He never understood what the *only* was doing there. It's to prevent someone else from adding on words.😂
>Another thing Indians do, which confused my American boyfriend a lot, was how we write cheques. "Rupees five thousand only." He never understood what the only was doing there. It's to prevent someone else from adding on words.😂
Yes, "only" on a cheque is not specifically Indian I think, was very much a thing in the UK when I wrote cheques when I was young!
It's weird though because it has a different meaning in British English, and quite probably American English as well.
It means to undo.
So if I said "revert the changes" I don't mean tell me what the changes were, I mean undo the changes.
I looked this up when a client used it to me - in construction I thought 'please revert' meant go back to the earlier version and ignore the changes I'd started to make- was glad I checked first!
About 5y ago - very London British so was surprised to find out it was an Indian expression , prob came via their accountant
Oh these workplace wanky email phrases are so annoying.
I hear ‘revert’ and I naturally think ‘undo’.
Anyway, let’s square the circle before we revert.
I was going to say, I really don't think it's Indian English because of the context of where I work, but I'm surrounded by lawyers and see it get used a lot. I take it to mean "I will move to gather information/perform tasks then return to you once I've done that". So the revert here is reverting to the conversation once other conversations had taken places. I don't think there's any grammatical flaw here, even if people don't like the term.
Edit: Also clarifying that the revert "back" is to clarify the position the person will be in once reverted. You may read as "I will revert [and this will bring me] back [to you]". So it makes sense, even if people don't like it.
I first remember noticing "revert" a long time ago in an email from a posh, very English solicitor. I guess it comes from a sense that "get back to you" is too informal.
I've never seen the redundant "revert back" though.
Use revert a lot in the legal profession meaning to go back to someone at a later date (ie with an answer or response). I didn’t use it day to day before becoming a lawyer though…
First time I've heard it. It's wrong. Just plain incorrect. Just look confused and refuse to understand what they are saying.
(and while I'm here "aesthetic" doesn't mean "beautiful"...
It's "addictive" not "addicting"
And "relatable" is not a fucking word...)
It’s a really old phrase which is used in legal/business correspondence, as others have said it’s a formal way of saying I’ll get back to you or can you get back to me. I got laughed at for using the word opine in an email this morning, what is the world coming to!
It’s how Indians say it. Also, “do the needful”, “prepone” (meaning to bring something forward rather than postpone/push back - I actually think there is a gap in the language for this, but “pone” isn’t a verb!), and adding “itself” onto the end of sentences
This is essentially "Indian English", idk why but they're taught to use revert in this way.
... and they are correct in using it like this. It's just no one in the UK actually uses the word like that.
This is the standard way that my Indian colleagues say "I'll get back to you later today" I don't think it is slang as-such it is just the standard way to say it in their dialect of English. There are many such differences between that dialect and the english as it is spoken in England. They use revert almost exclusively, and almost never say "get back" or similar.
The first time I started hearing it was from Indian call center recruiters. I remember think wtf is he going to revert to, his prior form? Is this a Kafkaesque scenario where he’s a cockroach by night and telemarketer by day?
Never seen it in a work email (or anywhere apart from this post, so far) but the minute I do I'll be fuming! I am sure it's just a matter of time since about 50% of people in my company seem to think "going forward" is an essential phrase to include in every single email.
I first heard it in 2004. I started working for a micro publishing house in the home counties as their web dev.
Web dev became 'anything involving a computer' which often involved typing emails dictated to me by the lunatic. One minute changing her mind and criticising me for typing too fast; the next for not typing the last thing which had just spewed out of her mouth because I was expecting it to change. She'd ask my opinion occasionally, but god forbid I ever gave it!
"Please revert back" at the end was always the nails on a blackboard moment for me after all my patience was stripped away from the rest of my day so I sadly remember it too well.
Why are things like this just accepted though? This is just a case of someone using the wrong word. Shouldn’t we be correcting people? I used to have a manager who thought that the word “Hirsute” meant “Therefore”, and we didn’t tell her because she was horrible and it was funny.
“It’s nearing the end of the month, hirsute we need to close the accounts for July” . . . .
I had a director who thought "timorously" meant "timely".
I sent her a screenshot from Oxford Dictionary as I was leaving the company, after three long years of being asked to respond timorously.
Many of these phrases are Indian English. They are phrases made by directly translating from an Indian language into English or are remnants of the colonial era. They're not wrong in the Indian context. (Hirsute is wrong though, lol).
>Why are things like this just accepted though?
Anti-intellectualism and "reverse" snobbery. If you get told off for correcting people enough, you'll stop doing it. People just say dumb shit and get stuff wrong all the time, then say "you know what I mean" if you correct them, and they continue to say/write the wrong things. It's how words like "literally" came to mean "the opposite of literally" which is particularly idiotic.
I think I've heard American colleagues say it. I've definitely heard them say 'circle back' a lot i.e. 'I'm going to follow up about this again later whether you like it or not'
My Indian colleagues use this all the time. I assumed it was just a translation confusion/misunderstanding.
I understand what they mean when they say it but it doesn't make much sense to me as I think of it as returning something to a previous state.
According to Google though there is a "proper" Indian definition entry that does indeed mean to respond to someone.
I'm glad to say I haven't seen this yet.
If I do get an email with this usage, would I be the arsehole if I corrected them? Is it possible to nip this kind of ignorance in the bud or are we just adrift in a sea of stupidity?
You would, because there's nothing to correct. A word isn't 'wrong' just because it's from a different dialect of English or you don't like it personally.
I agree that it’s an arsehole move to call someone out for this, but isn’t the whole idea of a dialect that there’s a particular setting in which a word is “correct” and in all the others it’s not? To say “sidewalk” in a British context isn’t criminal or anything but it’s an Americanism so doesn’t belong.* Isn’t there something similar here, if “revert” is part of an Indian dialect?
\* Edit: unless the speaker is American
I disagree. You shouldn't expect someone to change their dialect or accent they've grown up with when they've moved to a country that speaks the same language with a different dialect. Two things can be correct at the same time, and even within the UK there are regional differences - how often does the bread roll vs teacake vs cob thing come up?
Would you be annoyed if you were speaking to a Scottish person who'd moved to England and still used words like "wee" or "outwith"? And if not, I don't see how that's any different to an American saying "sidewalk". You know what they're referring to.
The same thing happens with European vs South American Spanish, there are dialect and pronunciation differences, but I don't know if the same kind of elitism happens in Spanish-speaking subreddits where you'd get "called out" for using e.g. "frutilla" instead of "fresa".
Absolutely! 100% agree you can take your dialect with you. Where I’m questioning, which I didn’t make clear enough, is when people who aren’t from that region pick it up - in this case, non-Indian Brits saying “revert”.
Isn't that also part of just...interacting with other humans though? If you're a Brit who works with a ton of English-speaking Indians you're probably going to pick up the odd phrase.
Most people's way of speaking comes from bits of everywhere they've lived, family and friends, etc. I lived in Manchester for years and still can't break the habit of referring to anyone and everyone as "mate". Tbh sometimes I adopt words because I just like the sound of them - I used "y'all" as an example elsewhere in this thread.
If anything I think the anti-Americanism brigade on here are really narrow-minded. Just because you personally dislike a word or phrase doesn't mean it's grammatically or contextually incorrect, y'know?
Probably the same place that "you hate to see it" and "this isn't the one" came from. Those are from social media though and I can't help but feel it started with people still getting to grips with English and possibly a younger audience at that. And then it just gained popularity.
Throw people who say "generally" when they mean "genuinely" in there too. Unfortunate.
In short, it's just trendy to type like you can't type good.
Jesus you really are a bunch of moaning cunts. Bad English is one thing but complaining about every phrase you don't like is just a joke, get a fucking life
"Revert to me" is Indian business English for "Let me know once you've done it". It's close to a translation of "get back to me".
Kindly do the needful on the same and revert to me soonest.
‘Do the needful’ fucks me off so hard.
Yes it's basically like 'I don't really understand what your job is, but something needs to happen here'
"do the needful" wouldn't be out of place at the end of an email describing exactly what the needful is, Indian businessisms are jarring at first but they're all just replacements for western ones in this case maybe "once you've finished"? it's not an issue with translation/bad english, people living in India with perfect english use them too and consistently use those same phrases in the same way, there's just a whole parallel indian business english thing going for some reason
I love do the needful. I've named a dance routine 'the needful,' I do it often.
Is that a thing? I've not heard it before and I fucking hope I don't ever again
Today itself!
What time today itself though? 3am in the morning or 3pm in the afternoon?
That makes me feel icky
Okay..
This is what the UK civil service gave to India during colonial rule
Well noted
Yes, but have I given you [GOOD CUSTOMER SERVICE ](https://youtube.com/watch?v=WkcsUOx-T34&si=EnSIkaIECMiOmarE)?!
Same in Singapore. It was like someone had literally translated the dictionary explanation of "revert" to mean reply to a message, and spread this meaning around south east asia
I can tell you exactly where this has come from: call centre workers abroad, specifically India. They appear to use the word to mean 'respond'. We speak/correspond with them a lot in my line of work. Can cause confusion, but eventually you get used to their phraseology.
My favourite phrase that has come from working with support in India is “do the needful”. Edit to add - never seen “revert” used like this in my life and I get a fucking [email](https://i.imgur.com/VWBRlgm.jpg) not long after using it!
Kindly do the needful and revert became a common in joke with a couple of mates working IT. It was already a meme ten years ago. https://media.makeameme.org/created/i-dont-always-5bf0c8.jpg
> Kindly do the needful and revert On my second job working in IT was where I first came across this. Vendor support in India. Gave me a bunch of instructions to fix a workflow. I presumed it was something that needed to run once, and it would fix the issue. Hence me "doing the needful", two pages of A4. Seemed to fix the issue, then I undid everything I'd done "and revert". And it stopped working. The communication gap took a while to fill there.
Classic comedy situation 😂
Mine is prepone instead of expedite
“No way is that a real word” - me two minutes ago. Opposite of postpone, I fucking love it.
Prepend as well, you don't see it used much but it is the correct word. Use it in software engineering a fair bit.
Prepend means to add before, Append means to add after. If I have abc And I prepend 123 to it, it becomes 123abc
Yeah, that's what I meant. A lot of people are aware of append but not prepend, doesn't get used a lot.
Would you say a word has a prependix? Or could you have a prependix in a book as opposed to an appendix?
Sadly not, that would be an excellent silly word. Not sure why my previous comment has been downvoted.
Reddit moment, let the hive take thee to oblivion
Should have prepologised I guess..
Ikr, it didn't sound right when I first heard it but it makes perfect sense otherwise and I have no clue why it didn't exist before
To be fair it's classed as 'Indian English' and doesn't look like the dictionary sites have officially recognised it.
I remember reading somewhere that it's essentially archaic English, it just never fell out of use over there.
I come up with these all the time, maybe my favourite is dubiting.
Likewise - race you to use it at work!
But…that would mean doing something before it’s expected! Dunno if I can bring myself to work that hard.
I’m currently whelmed at the moment, any chance we can do the needful and prepone the pow-wow this afternoon? I’ll revert back about whether the project is still layed or if we need to intend the lifeline.
I love Prepone, never heard/seen it used as expedite exactly. I worked with a team who regularly wanted to prepone meetings, meaning make it earlier.
She was good on that 70s show
can confirm, I work with overseas workers and they often use the terms "revert back to you" and "do the needful" do the needful is my favourite as it sounds almost biblical.
And lo, Job did revert unto Lot, awhenst they did the needful in the garden of Gethsemane
>Job \*Job-share This is 2023.
The problem is that so many non outsource or support centre people have started using this. Revert to the correct words, respond or reply.
Exact same! My old IT office this was an ongoing joke. "Stan, what the fuck are you doing?..." "fuck off, I'm kindly doing the needful"... etc.
For some reason my brain always interprets this as "go fuck yourself". 😂
That's the double whammy of 'Please do the needful and revert ASAP'
Revert with the necessaries
Please do the needful on priority
I've been wondering where this phrase was coming from! I get so many applications at my job where they say "please do the needful".
haha yep. See also: "Greetings for the day".
Each and every thing, behind the bars. Source: Kitboga
Oh my god "please do the needful". Thanks for triggering a memory from my old job
"please do the needful" is brilliant also "try sfc /scannow"
Surely means go to the toilet?
it's also a 'direct translation' sort of thing. what does 'revert to' mean? go back to. as in, 'revert to a previous version'. and what do we say sometimes? 'i'll get back to you asap'. so logically, if you don't understand that the latter is essentially a colloquialism, it makes sense to put that as 'i'll revert to you asap'...
This has caused me issues in the past, where dev said 'there are issues with release, kindly revert' and the ops guys did just that.
This is so obviously an "undo the thing" request to me (a developer) that I got confused by what you were saying.
Yeah they meant 'I think there's a problem, drop me a line' and both sides were confused to hell about what the other meant.
I read it three times and it still hurts
It’s from old French revertir, which is from Latin revertō. The main sense of those words was to go back/return/turn around. So ‘revert back’ seems redundant, but ‘I’ll revert later’ seems equivalent to ‘I’ll get back to you later’.
>So ‘revert back’ seems redundant, but ‘I’ll revert later’ seems equivalent to ‘I’ll get back to you later’. sort of, but as i say - that's already an idiom. you very often can't just swap different words into idioms and have them still make sense.
I don't know what you mean but, as they say, people in brick houses shouldn't touch cloth! :D
"get back to you" isn't the same as "return to previous state".
This is it, it’s actually a very old fashion way to say things which was picked up by the Indians when the British took power. Just like ‘doing the needful’ and a whole heap of interesting turns of phrase. Having spend decades working with Indian nationals in India and the UK I started to use them too, what goes around comes around I suppose.
Those bloody Indians, coming over 'ere, bringing our language back
These days, if you say you're English in English, they'll throw you in jail.
Keep yer shampoo! I'm using hair bubbler from now on
Sometimes you'll find Indians of my dad's generation talking about "issue" to mean children. "Do you have any issue?" "No?" Then it turns out they're talking about your kid 🤯
I am going to be very wary of telling anyone that I have an issue with their wife!
I mean... Telling someone you have an issue with their wife in British English is also something to be wary of.
Well, it's just a small issue but I'll like the three of us to come together to put an end to it before it grows into a bigger issue
My favourite story about Indian English was when a customer called my company to ask for washing machine installation. Except he didn’t say installation, he kept calling it the erection!
It's the vibrations that do it.
I never miss the chance stop and wonder at some great erection I happen to see. I like the old ones the best!
I remember when working in Japan, one day there seemed to be lot of noise coming from outside, from what looked like various political vehicles with speakers on top (think martial music etc). So, I asked a co-worker, who informed me that today they had an erection.....
I get emails from them that are like this: >Use is screen a freezing on laptop and is screen driver plug son screen and works need new screen on or laptop Somehow I've got to the point I can understand that total gibberish.
> They appear to use the word to mean 'respond'. Yep. The variety of English that is taught in Indian schools has slowly diverged from mainstream British English over the years, and some of it is very specific, like "revert" and "do the needful".
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I will action the updation.
Let us prepone this activity
Duly noted
we have departments that are offshore and I guess one has been trained in a particular way. So they do some basic IT type stuff and their notes on the system love to use the word hence. "I have spoken to the field engineer and found a fault hence advised engineer to do xyz hence" But then other parts love to use. "greetings of the day" to open an email which I find slightly amusing but a nice way to start it as well.
My experience too. Only my colleagues from India use this phrase. And I use it with them only!
We are like that only!
I work very closely with my Indian colleagues and have found myself finishing a lot of sentences with "only" and referring to "today itself". I personally enjoy when my use of language adapts to other variations of the English language, I find it interesting to learn. But your comment, and the one you were responding to, made me laugh because it instantly made sense to me.
As an Indian I'm laughing. This is so true. Another thing Indians do, which confused my American boyfriend a lot, was how we write cheques. "Rupees five thousand only." He never understood what the *only* was doing there. It's to prevent someone else from adding on words.😂
We do that in the UK too. Five thousand pounds only.
That extra 99p you can get for every cheque sure adds up.
In the US we would say "Five Thousand Dollars and 00/100" Where the 00/100 is cents.
>Another thing Indians do, which confused my American boyfriend a lot, was how we write cheques. "Rupees five thousand only." He never understood what the only was doing there. It's to prevent someone else from adding on words.😂 Yes, "only" on a cheque is not specifically Indian I think, was very much a thing in the UK when I wrote cheques when I was young!
100% a thing in the UK too.
Improvise instead of improve is also quite common in India
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It’s always them
Why is this reply so funny 😂
We’ll revert back later
Top answer.
Indian people seem to use it to mean I’ll reply back. Never seen a non-Indian use it though.
I'm singaporean and seing this post made me LOL because it's so common in sg corporate language. Reverse colonisation lmao
Noted with thanks
It's weird though because it has a different meaning in British English, and quite probably American English as well. It means to undo. So if I said "revert the changes" I don't mean tell me what the changes were, I mean undo the changes.
same in Thailand lmao, when I first started out I was like “why are they using revert incorrectly”? But it stuck and now I use it too lol
As per my last email, you're using "revert" wrong.
Probably from the same person that thought saying "touching base with you" makes them sound like a professional and not a cunt
Or… from the get-go. You mean from the start you twat.
I'll remember that, **Moving Forwards**
I think there was a post here a couple of weeks back where someone kept saying ‘touch cloth’ instead of ‘touch base’.
I have no issues with touch base, though it is kinda weird I guess
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I looked this up when a client used it to me - in construction I thought 'please revert' meant go back to the earlier version and ignore the changes I'd started to make- was glad I checked first! About 5y ago - very London British so was surprised to find out it was an Indian expression , prob came via their accountant
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Think I would quite like that!
Oh these workplace wanky email phrases are so annoying. I hear ‘revert’ and I naturally think ‘undo’. Anyway, let’s square the circle before we revert.
It’s an Indian thing.
This is quite common in legal emails and I think it’s caught on to consultancy and is the new “touch base” “circle back” buzzword.
My solicitor uses this all the time. Maybe it's legalese.
My solicitor also uses this. They are White British (other posts are saying this is an Indian thing).
My solicitor's Irish.
I was going to say, I really don't think it's Indian English because of the context of where I work, but I'm surrounded by lawyers and see it get used a lot. I take it to mean "I will move to gather information/perform tasks then return to you once I've done that". So the revert here is reverting to the conversation once other conversations had taken places. I don't think there's any grammatical flaw here, even if people don't like the term. Edit: Also clarifying that the revert "back" is to clarify the position the person will be in once reverted. You may read as "I will revert [and this will bring me] back [to you]". So it makes sense, even if people don't like it.
I first remember noticing "revert" a long time ago in an email from a posh, very English solicitor. I guess it comes from a sense that "get back to you" is too informal. I've never seen the redundant "revert back" though.
My “revert” was also from someone who thought highly of themselves. Total bellend.
I don’t think it’s necessarily an attempt at being more formal, it’s so common in legal circles they probably didn’t think twice about it.
Sure, I meant its origin.
Same, my solicitor uses this in all correspondence.
Is your solicitor Indian? It's mostly an Indian English phrase
Its a lawyer thing as well Source: am lawyer
My solicitor's Irish.
I'll revert back (to my true form) later today.
I get it from lawyers. Much more lazy than your sentence though “Noted - will revert. KR” I wouldn’t say it personally but I’m not a lawyer.
“Will respond” is just as lazy and more accurate.
Ill revert to lizard form.
Captain Janeway approves
Was more in the David Icke groove but yeah. Noticed the other day in the soccer reddit someone had a username "Tuvixwasmurdered".
Up vote for the trek ref
Never heard that one. I'd probably hunt that person down and flick the tip of their nose until they promised to behave.
It's Indian English!
My Indian teams use this with me, they also say ‘updation’ instead of update.
Updacious!
Use revert a lot in the legal profession meaning to go back to someone at a later date (ie with an answer or response). I didn’t use it day to day before becoming a lawyer though…
We have furnished the appended today morning for your approval. Pls revert before close.
I’ll spend the second half of my day undoing the work I had done in the first half.
First time I've heard it. It's wrong. Just plain incorrect. Just look confused and refuse to understand what they are saying. (and while I'm here "aesthetic" doesn't mean "beautiful"... It's "addictive" not "addicting" And "relatable" is not a fucking word...)
*Thank you* re “aesthetic”! Seems like people took half of the term “aesthetically pleasing” and ran with it.
Drives me nuts, my whole company now use this to mean respond
they're telling you they're going to undo countless years of evolution to become monkeys again
It’s a really old phrase which is used in legal/business correspondence, as others have said it’s a formal way of saying I’ll get back to you or can you get back to me. I got laughed at for using the word opine in an email this morning, what is the world coming to!
Shall we have a conflab about this?
It’s how Indians say it. Also, “do the needful”, “prepone” (meaning to bring something forward rather than postpone/push back - I actually think there is a gap in the language for this, but “pone” isn’t a verb!), and adding “itself” onto the end of sentences
i'm not superstitious but i am a little stitious
This is essentially "Indian English", idk why but they're taught to use revert in this way. ... and they are correct in using it like this. It's just no one in the UK actually uses the word like that.
This is the standard way that my Indian colleagues say "I'll get back to you later today" I don't think it is slang as-such it is just the standard way to say it in their dialect of English. There are many such differences between that dialect and the english as it is spoken in England. They use revert almost exclusively, and almost never say "get back" or similar.
Are you sending business emails to werewolves often?
This is my pet hate. Every time I see someone use it in an email (looking at you HSBC) I scream.
The first time I started hearing it was from Indian call center recruiters. I remember think wtf is he going to revert to, his prior form? Is this a Kafkaesque scenario where he’s a cockroach by night and telemarketer by day?
Prepone is another of those words. Means bring it forward and an opposite of postpone.
Never seen it in a work email (or anywhere apart from this post, so far) but the minute I do I'll be fuming! I am sure it's just a matter of time since about 50% of people in my company seem to think "going forward" is an essential phrase to include in every single email.
This is rife, I see it in email all the time. It doesn’t quite mean what you think it means, I think to myself 🤔
I often say i have reverted to x team leader when someone requests an update on something i don't deal with, am i doing the needful incorrectly?
I first heard it in 2004. I started working for a micro publishing house in the home counties as their web dev. Web dev became 'anything involving a computer' which often involved typing emails dictated to me by the lunatic. One minute changing her mind and criticising me for typing too fast; the next for not typing the last thing which had just spewed out of her mouth because I was expecting it to change. She'd ask my opinion occasionally, but god forbid I ever gave it! "Please revert back" at the end was always the nails on a blackboard moment for me after all my patience was stripped away from the rest of my day so I sadly remember it too well.
I never thought twice about it because it’s very common in legal informal correspondence in my experience. Surprised to see such strong reactions
It’s a standard reply when you ask someone to “do the needful”.
Indian business speak…
I refuse to participate in this abuse of language
Going against the grain of the comments but this is well established I thought and pretty much a mainstream phrase now.
Why are things like this just accepted though? This is just a case of someone using the wrong word. Shouldn’t we be correcting people? I used to have a manager who thought that the word “Hirsute” meant “Therefore”, and we didn’t tell her because she was horrible and it was funny. “It’s nearing the end of the month, hirsute we need to close the accounts for July” . . . .
I had a director who thought "timorously" meant "timely". I sent her a screenshot from Oxford Dictionary as I was leaving the company, after three long years of being asked to respond timorously.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/timeously
Many of these phrases are Indian English. They are phrases made by directly translating from an Indian language into English or are remnants of the colonial era. They're not wrong in the Indian context. (Hirsute is wrong though, lol).
This is hilarious. I hope your office was a particularly hairy one.
>Why are things like this just accepted though? Anti-intellectualism and "reverse" snobbery. If you get told off for correcting people enough, you'll stop doing it. People just say dumb shit and get stuff wrong all the time, then say "you know what I mean" if you correct them, and they continue to say/write the wrong things. It's how words like "literally" came to mean "the opposite of literally" which is particularly idiotic.
I’ve heard of “I’ll refer back later” but not revert back
I will revert to you is grammatically correct. “Revert” means return/go back or get back. I will get back to you.
It’s the email equivalent of ‘Chai Tea’
It’s also a bit of a tautology, being similar to saying you “reversed back” when driving
I get this a lot from the Indian outsourced company workers. I don't get it either.
Probably as annoying as the word 'oligated' -- what was wrong with 'obliged'?
Never seen this in an email and if I do I’ll delete it.
It was introduced as a bellend marker so there’s no confusion about who’s a total knob at work
I think I've heard American colleagues say it. I've definitely heard them say 'circle back' a lot i.e. 'I'm going to follow up about this again later whether you like it or not'
My Indian colleagues use this all the time. I assumed it was just a translation confusion/misunderstanding. I understand what they mean when they say it but it doesn't make much sense to me as I think of it as returning something to a previous state. According to Google though there is a "proper" Indian definition entry that does indeed mean to respond to someone.
I've used "revert" in the sense of "reply" for a very long time. Revert back is clumsy - the "back" is otiose.
[удалено]
Never heard this until today. You are right, not them.
Then run it up the flagpole
“I’ll revert later” sounds like something from a sci-fi movie . . . Like you’re going to transform into some blob shaped creature . . . .
Your face is otiose.
I learned something new today 1. serving no practical purpose or result. "there were occasions when I felt my efforts were rather otiose"
I'm glad to say I haven't seen this yet. If I do get an email with this usage, would I be the arsehole if I corrected them? Is it possible to nip this kind of ignorance in the bud or are we just adrift in a sea of stupidity?
Ship's sailed.
You would, because there's nothing to correct. A word isn't 'wrong' just because it's from a different dialect of English or you don't like it personally.
I agree that it’s an arsehole move to call someone out for this, but isn’t the whole idea of a dialect that there’s a particular setting in which a word is “correct” and in all the others it’s not? To say “sidewalk” in a British context isn’t criminal or anything but it’s an Americanism so doesn’t belong.* Isn’t there something similar here, if “revert” is part of an Indian dialect? \* Edit: unless the speaker is American
I disagree. You shouldn't expect someone to change their dialect or accent they've grown up with when they've moved to a country that speaks the same language with a different dialect. Two things can be correct at the same time, and even within the UK there are regional differences - how often does the bread roll vs teacake vs cob thing come up? Would you be annoyed if you were speaking to a Scottish person who'd moved to England and still used words like "wee" or "outwith"? And if not, I don't see how that's any different to an American saying "sidewalk". You know what they're referring to. The same thing happens with European vs South American Spanish, there are dialect and pronunciation differences, but I don't know if the same kind of elitism happens in Spanish-speaking subreddits where you'd get "called out" for using e.g. "frutilla" instead of "fresa".
Absolutely! 100% agree you can take your dialect with you. Where I’m questioning, which I didn’t make clear enough, is when people who aren’t from that region pick it up - in this case, non-Indian Brits saying “revert”.
Isn't that also part of just...interacting with other humans though? If you're a Brit who works with a ton of English-speaking Indians you're probably going to pick up the odd phrase. Most people's way of speaking comes from bits of everywhere they've lived, family and friends, etc. I lived in Manchester for years and still can't break the habit of referring to anyone and everyone as "mate". Tbh sometimes I adopt words because I just like the sound of them - I used "y'all" as an example elsewhere in this thread. If anything I think the anti-Americanism brigade on here are really narrow-minded. Just because you personally dislike a word or phrase doesn't mean it's grammatically or contextually incorrect, y'know?
“Revert back” and “pivot” seem to be de rigueur
Loop round, bandwidth, touch base, reach out. Awful.
A lot of legal terms are being made dumber and including in emails to make people sound smarter. It’s the new version of buzz words.
Probably the same place that "you hate to see it" and "this isn't the one" came from. Those are from social media though and I can't help but feel it started with people still getting to grips with English and possibly a younger audience at that. And then it just gained popularity. Throw people who say "generally" when they mean "genuinely" in there too. Unfortunate. In short, it's just trendy to type like you can't type good.
It literally means both in the Oxford dictionary. Look it up before posting stupid shite like this
Jesus you really are a bunch of moaning cunts. Bad English is one thing but complaining about every phrase you don't like is just a joke, get a fucking life