Phrontistery

Chasing up an email recently that I hadn’t had a response to I received the following reply: “I am currently out of the office. My emails are being forwarded to my assistant who will revert back to you as soon as possible”

REVERT ? ~ I looked at this for quite a while and wondered what I should do. I’ve had property revert to me from time to time, but never a human being. How would I know that the assistant had reverted back to me, I’m pretty sure I would recognise if they got back to me.

Clearly a Thesaurus had been consulted during the composition of this automated reply and in an attempt to ‘big up their importance’ they had looked for something that sounded far more impressive than ‘get back to you’ or simply ‘reply to you’ and revert was the unfortunate result.

I confess to using the thesaurus myself, not to look for more difficult words but simply because, increasingly so, I can’t remember the simple ones.

I was talking to a friend on the phone last week and I mentioned a classical concert I had watched on the telly one afternoon last month, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra doing the…‘you-know-that–thing-quite-famous from Tristan and Isolde’. But I couldn’t think what the thing was called. This went on for a while and despite my repetition and prompts of ‘the bit at the beginning’ and ‘before it starts’ or ‘Tristan’s got a famous one’ he was none the wiser nor could I remember and so the conversation drifted effortlessly and comfortably onto another subject before we duly said our farewells and ended the call.

But it was bugging me and later that evening I remembered the word I had been searching for and called him back. ‘Overture’ I said feeling all smug.He kindly said he was pleased that I had remembered & not to worry when words slip away, but it’s hard not to.

I have never lost obvious words like ‘Lettuce’ or ‘Velocipede’ but there are numerous object in the house whose names so often escape me that when I invariably refer to ‘the wireless’ Jayne now automatically knows which of object I am actually talking about.

So perhaps the best thing is to visit the thesaurus, I just looked up ‘looked up’ as you clearly can’t rely on others as they always lengthen you (I just looked up ‘let down’).

The phrasal verb is the problem when made up of more than one word as generally it can have a variety of uses. One can ‘put up’ a shelf, ‘put up’ friends for the weekend, ‘put up’ a candidate and even ‘put up’ with a load of nonsense, thus you have to be careful about the range of meanings on offer before use. I suspect someone looked up the phrase ‘set back’ and came up with this ridiculous reminder I once saw on a hotel TV screen ‘upon retiring please retard your clocks by one hour’

Having checked my email I can find no evidence that the assistant did revert to me, nor more interestingly even ‘get back’ or ‘reply’ to me. Perhaps they also had read the automated reply and simply decided to safely lie low. But, that leaves me in a quandary as I have been ‘seriously extinguished’ so should I ‘emancipate’ it or write back to the sender and ‘accelerate’. I suspect that this is the sort of thing you are not supposed to ‘eructate’ and perhaps I am ‘exploding’ it out of all proportion.