Reposted from my blog on Medium:
Towards the end of a dinner of delicious Knödel (German dumpling) variations with mushroom sauce, followed by a curd cheese Knödel dessert with cherry and cream (with complimentary schnapps) at the Knödelwirtschaft restaurant in Neukölln, my German fiancée and I find ourselves talking about more banal matters, such as work. I allocate an appropriate amount of attention to the old topic (she has been feeling frustrated at her work for a while now) and respond here and there while feeling heavy from a good German stuffing and slightly giddy from the alcohol.
And then suddenly I hear,
“… that’s why I have to prepone all of those seminars…”
and, without fully processing, my inner hound ears shoot straight up, and I blurt out, “Wait, you have to what?” just to make sure I heard her right through the schnapps. “I have to prepone all of those seminars?” A long second passes as I run the word through all of the situations and permutations in my entire English-speaking experience where someone had to bring/move XXX forward — and came up with nothing.
The problem is, I understand exactly what she means, and the undeniable logic of opposing “postpone” with the prefix “pre-” and “pone” (from the Latin ponere — to put) and the word’s absence in my vocabulary demanded an urgent response from a “native English speaker”. So I hastily said, “Prepone is not a word” — with as much confidence as Germans in their train schedules. “At least, I’m pretty sure it’s not a word,” I add, “I know what you mean, but I think you just made it up”. “But I have already used it several times before?” she insists. “Yeah, it’s still not a word”. We giggle, shrug it off as another Denglish accident and leave the restaurant to walk off the calories in the breezy Neukölln night, exchanging our respective stories in the neighbourhood.
It isn’t until I’m in bed that I finally notice the itch at the back of my brain that I didn’t double-check the word, so I turn to Google and find out:
I was wrong. Prepone is a word!
Not a word in “standard” English usage, but in Indian English. Merriam-Webster has a very nice little summary of the word, and it is one of the words they’re “watching”, as it may well be adopted into mainstream usage someday. And I, for one, would be all for it. Because it makes no sense that there isn’t a word to oppose “postpone” when there are so many other instances of opposing words having the prefixes “pre” and “post”. As it turns out, my fiancée used this exact logic to come up with the word, having never heard it before, because it’s very common in German to add opposing prefixes to verbs that express opposite action, e.g., aufrunden and abrunden — to round up and round down.
I’m also not sure how I feel about being deprived of such a logical (and it’s a lot cleaner to say “prepone” than “move XXX forward”) English expression as a native “standard” English speaker. What does that still mean in 2023 anyway? With this thought, I drift to sleep, thinking that I may have to prepone lunch with a friend.
