Your flight has been preponed

A friend of mine got an email alert from her airline. “Your flight has been preponed.” She hadn’t heard that word before. It took her a brief moment to figure out “preponed” is the opposite of “postponed” which was confirmed in the email. Her flight departure time was moved earlier.

She shared the anecdote with me and I was shocked as well. An airline flight can leave early? In my entire life, flights only depart late. But putting aside that scheduling anomaly, I’d like to focus on the word “preponed.”

Preponed sounds strange to my North American ears, but it is commonly used by international English speakers. The prefix “pre” means “before” and the “poned” part comes from Latin, meaning “to put or place” something.

I’m more familiar with the term “pwned” (pronounced as “poned”) which is internet slang for being defeated embarrassingly easily. It was a typo of the word “owned” but caught on. For example, a beginner video game player will be mercilessly pwned by an expert gamer. To save myself from embarrassment, I don’t even try new video games so I am effectively prepwned.

Ironically, preponed came after postponed. Postponed was commonly used for centuries but preponed became adopted in the twentieth century. Clearly, someone looked at the “post” in postponed and logically applied a “pre” instead. Wait a second! Should I try to coin new words that way? It could mean certain death.

Posthumous means “after death.” So let’s get “Prehumous” in the vernacular. I see it being popular like YOLO (You Only Live Once). For example, “Hey dude, you gotta try skydiving prehumously!” The only drawback to the word is it is easily confused with “prehummus” which, of course, means chickpeas.

Also on the death theme is the word postmortem. I’m no coroner, so my use of the term was limited to the project management practice of having a meeting after a big failure to blame people identify lessons learned. Maybe we need premortem meetings where all get together to moan about all the ways the project is going to go to shit. I just realized that I was conducting premortems in my head every night laying in bed sleeplessly while I was a project manager.

I assume you know the saying, “When you assume, you make an ASS out of U and ME.” The more responsible thing to do is to presume. To presume is to research the available evidence and make a thoughtful, educated guess on the truth. I’d like to propose “postsume” which means changing your opinion after being shown irrefutable proof that you were wrong. Hmm… never mind. That word will never be used.

I must stop writing now because I am off to see the new movie, “The End of Oak Street.” It’s about a family and their street being sent millions of years into the past where they are hunted by dinosaurs. I would describe it as: “A family is preponed to prehistoric times to be pwned by dinosaurs. Hopefully they escape prehumously!”

I just hope the movie starts on time as scheduled (i.e. that it’s poned… midponed? epiponed? homoponed? I’m still workshopping that word.)