I'll Revert

Disclaimer: All characters and events mentioned in this post, even those based on real people, are entirely fictional. Any similarity to people, living, dead, or somewhere in between, is purely fictional and shall be considered to be the product of the fertile imagination of the reader. 

“I’ll revert at the earliest.”

Lately, this statement has been bumping into me more and more. Every time I read this, I struggle to suppress the GIF forming inside my head, of a human suddenly sprouting hair from all over his body, his spine bending, tailbone growing out long, in short, turning into a primate, the last common ancestor we shared with the Chimpanzee.

I’m sure the statement was not made with that GIF in mind. What the speaker perhaps intended to convey was that he would reply at the earliest. His earnestness is beyond doubt, of course. But let’s see what “revert” actually means.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “revert” means, “Return to (a previous state, practice, topic, etc.)”. So when a human being decides to revert, and that too at the earliest, well, you can understand the GIF in my head.

And then there’s the “I’ll revert back”. Now go back to the GIF. Only this time, the man is transforming into a primate, stops the transformation midway and then loses all the hair, straightens his spine and becomes human again. Or think about your school days, when your PT Master would issue two subsequent orders of “About Turn” bringing you back to looking at his angry face again. That’s what “revert back” does to me. It’s a Nolan-esque abomination that puts you on a recursive loop, see what I did there? Recursion itself implies that it’s an endless loop, so a recursive loop is a meta term for describing recursion or loops. 

So, “revert back” places you on a recursive roller coaster ride,  where your co-passenger is the other abomination, “repeat again”. “Repeat” means to say/do something again. How would you “repeat again”? By getting into an infinite loop, where every time you finish doing the task, you decide to repeat it and then repeat it “again”? 

But we digress. We need to revert to “revert”. There. That’s one way to use “revert”.  One of the correct ways. 

All these are passé. The greatest of all, the greatest and perhaps most noble reverting that I have seen anyone want to achieve was the “I’ll revert to you”. If you go with the conventional meaning of “revert”, this statement presumes that I was an earlier version of the other person, (a humble Windows XP to the advanced Windows 10, if you may) and that this person is willing to go back to being me. But that’s not all of it. In legal context, “revert” is used to imply that the rights or ownership of a commodity will return to the previous owner. Now, let’s go back to “I’ll revert to you”. Is the person claiming that he will go back to being my property? Am I a slave-lord? Is this even legal? And if it isn’t, will that person be guilty of abetting the crime of slavery? I get all these questions when I read the apparently harmless, but obviously ominous “I’ll revert to you”.

Sometimes, all this makes me wonder when this may have started. I mean, when did we, as a civilization decide that it was ok to appropriate the word “revert” and force it to take the place of the perfectly useful “reply”? What’s wrong with “reply”? It’s easy, not a lot of characters to confuse the spelling, and everyone knows what it means. Hey, it even starts with an “r”, just like “revert”, so why not use it? 

I think there must have been some cataclysmic event, like the one that drove the dinosaurs to extinction, but in this case, pushed “revert” into our vocabulary in place of the simpler “reply”. I have been trying to trace this event, so that we can collectively err… revert to the day and time when we were no longer using “revert” when we wanted to say “reply”. Until then, I guess, people will continue to do this.