Prepone (verb), to advance, to move forward an appointment or event.

Usage: The examinations were preponed by four days, causing consternation to the students.

Unless you have managed to insulate yourself from the ubiquitous influence of social media, you have probably already learned that I was trolled extensively for using the word “prepone” in a letter and tweet. I had shared a letter I sent to Governor of Kerala, who (like all others in his position) also serves as University Chancellor, on the issue of the University abruptly deciding to hold its exams earlier than scheduled. Along with my letter, I tweeted objecting to “the extraordinary decision to prepone announced examinations by four days. Our students are resigned to postponements, but holding them earlier than planned plays havoc with preparations, especially post-floods!”

My intervention elicited some appreciation from the affected students, but a lot more heavy criticism from Twitterati for using the word “prepone”. Users professed to be “shocked” to see me committing a “mistake in regard to the English language”. One objector expostulated, “Clearly, your Twitter account handler needs English classes. “Prepone” isn’t a word!” Another waxed indignant: “You using Prepone? The Queen is turning in her bed. Write 370 times : Prepone is not an English word.” Though I write my own tweets as a rule, my poor staff came in for an unjustified share of the blame, with a typical language purist writing, “I guess someone else drafted this letter. Otherwise Mr Tharoor would certainly have used “advanced” instead of “preponed”.”

Well, I’m sorry, but they are wrong. Prepone is an English word. As my friend Sheeba Thattil, a retired professor of English, pointed out on her Twitter feed, ‘Prepone’ was used in a religious text in 1549, meaning “to set before”. The first usage of the word in the sense in which I used it was from a letter to the New York Times on Dec 5, 1913, from John D. Trenor: “For the benefit mainly of the legal profession in this age of hurry and bustle, may I be permitted to coin the word ‘prepone’ as a needed rival of that much-revered and oft-invoked standby, ‘postpone’?”

Ours is even more an age of hurry and bustle; though I was unaware of the good Mr Trenor’s letter to the New York Times, I first used “prepone” in an article in the now-defunct JS magazine in 1972, and allowed myself the vain I indulgence of assuming I had invented the term. “Prepone”, as a back-construction from “postpone”, seemed so much simpler, to a teenage collegian, than clunkily saying “could you move that appointment earlier?” or “I would like to advance that deadline” or “please bring it forward to an earlier date”. The word comes from the Latin “ponere”, to place; so just as “postpone” is to place later, why can’t “prepone” be to place before?

Over the years, I was gratified to see how extensively its use had spread in India, and allowed myself a pat on the back -- until I was set right by no less an eminence than Catherine Henstridge of the Oxford English Dictionary, who assured me the word very much exists in English, and I hadn’t invented it. She ought to know, dear Twitterati: the OED is the ultimate authority on the language!