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Oh my word Advance, Postpone
Advance has several meanings and functions both as a verb and a noun: move forward, put forward, lend money or pay money in advance for a service or goods, cause an event or a happening at an earlier date, raise something, ahead of the times (thinkers are ahead of the times because they have advanced thinking), for they think;
A: Hurry up, we have to rush to attend the meeting, if we don’t go it will be postponed.
B: Why did you prepone it in the first place?
A: I didn’t preponed it; I ‘advanced’ the meeting: brought it earlier. Please mind - prepone has no global acceptability. It reflects poorly on you.
B: You mean: I don’t know the language…I have advanced degree in linguistics.
A: Great. Let us not postpone this meeting. Hury up! Don’t use prepone, please!
One may hear someone dropping the word ‘prepone’ in conversations or reading the word in a sentence in some informal writings but it doesn’t exist. Linguistics attribute the usage of the word to only in India.
The opposite word for postpone is advance.
Advance has several meanings and functions both as a verb and a noun: move forward, put forward, lend money or pay money in advance for a service or goods, cause an event or a happening at an earlier date, raise something, ahead of the times (thinkers are ahead of the times because they have advanced thinking), for they think; as a noun it indicates to a loan, a payment made before the due date, progress; advance warning (attributive adjective) means information supplied beforehand; in advance means ahead in place or time.
Derivatives of advance are advances, advanced (adjective: sophisticated, modern, revolutionary, leading, prime: Only advanced actors and actresses survive in the movie world), advancing, advancement (noun: promotion of a cause, plan, and also promotion of a person from lower to higher level)
Postpone is a verb meaning cause or arrange an event or happening to happen or to take place at a later time or date. Derivatives of postpone are postpones, postponed, postponing, postponable (adjective) and postponement. There are few things that are not postponable: birth, death.
But there isn’t a formal word called prepone but linguists attribute the word to Indian English. Few dictionaries refer to the coinage of the word to 1970s but many standard dictionaries do not list this word at all. The word is gaining currency though the word sounds strange for puritans and diligent listeners who give importance to language: it is better to avoid it. Who knows it can gain acceptability globally one day but certainly not now. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” -Arthur C. Clarke India should provide inspiration climate for researchers to develop technologies so that we don’t postpone path-breaking inventions happening in the country.
