Revert=answer?

[charliedeut]

This text was in an email I received at the office:

"Please revert asap as we need to book the transport."

They are expecting information from us on loading address and approximate time. The sender is a native French speaker. Would the influence of French make her use "revert" meaning "answer"?

 

[emsr2d2]

It's an example of "workspeak" which seems to have crept in over the last few years. I have seen "Please revert" or "Please revert to me" countless times and it still leaps off the page at me as a very strange usage. It does not mean "reply". It means "return to" or "go back to" which makes no sense at all when what you want is for the person to actually reply to your email/letter/message.

Note that we can and do say "Please come back to me asap on this". In this context "to come back to sb" does mean "to reply to sb".

 

[BobK]

This text was in an email I received at the office:

"Please revert asap as we need to book the transport."

They are expecting information from us on loading address and approximate time. The sender is a native French speaker. Would the influence of French make her use "revert" meaning "answer"?

Conceivably they are consciously avoiding the right word (le mot juste) which would be 'respond' because they feel it might be a faux ami, being too like their own répondre.

b

 

[MikeNewYork]

It's an example of "workspeak" which seems to have crept in over the last few years. I have seen "Please revert" or "Please revert to me" countless times and it still leaps off the page at me as a very strange usage. It does not mean "reply". It means "return to" or "go back to" which makes no sense at all when what you want is for the person to actually reply to your email/letter/message.

Note that we can and do say "Please come back to me asap on this". In this context "to come back to sb" does mean "to reply to sb".

Corporate-speak aside, the verb "revert" does not fit there.