Precrastination. “This is a wonderful word that we have long needed without knowing it,” wrote Frederica Postman. “Doesn’t everybody have a device to postpone the required tasks? Before I learned this word, I was just wasting time. Now I know I was precrastinating. Thank you for your informative and amusing newsletter.”

“As an inveterate procrastinator of this particular sub-type,” Cynthia Harvey emailed from Virginia, “I have discovered, and come to love, the term ‘laterally productive’ instead. I get all sorts of things done — just not the important stuff I should be doing. It is very difficult to break this habit.”

John Mills wrote, “When I was studying music composition, the word ‘quill-sharpening’ was used in a deprecatory way to describe getting ready to compose, rather than composing. I’ve been unable to find a reference to this usage on the Web. It does seem to be common in the context of writers, satirists and critics ‘sharpening their pens’ in anticipation of penning a trenchant attack on something.”

Ron Witton recalled, “While travelling in India, I have heard fairly often the term ‘prepone’ as in ‘Your flight has been preponed’, meaning brought forward in time. It has happened sufficiently often for me to assume it is not an individual construct but a socially accepted word form.” The verb is widely known in India and dates from the 1970s.

“Summer of 1969, aged 17,” Henry Larsen recollects, “I was taken on at a factory as a seasonal helper. I was assigned to an old steamfitter by the name of Vern. Every Monday morning the foreman gave us all of our tasks for the week. My third or fourth week on the job, having settled in a bit and built up a little confidence, I looked at the new list and saw one particularly onerous job. In my youthful enthusiasm, I opined that we should do that one first and get it out of the way. ‘No’, said Vern. ‘Always do the easy jobs first. You never know, you might die before you get to the shit work’.” Precrastination meets procrastination.

Alan Weyman says that he lives his life by the rule he calls Ma&ntildeanismo, “Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow”. He believes, as many people do, that Mark Twain invented it. I query such attributions on principle (this one has also been ascribed to Oscar Wilde and others) but it’s half right. Garson O’Toole wrote about it on the Quote Investigator website; he discovered that Twain really is the source, in an article of 1870 criticising the way Benjamin Franklin popularised folksy aphorisms. Twain created the saying as a comical instance of something that Franklin might have said. He would surely have hated its being credited to him as a humorous proverb worth repeating.

Bounding main. Pat Spaeth commented on one of the snippets of poetry I cited in the piece last week: “If you look a little earlier in the text, you’ll see that your author knew little about the bounding main or sailing in general. The original verse starts: ‘Heave ho, me lads, the wind blows free / A pleasant gale is on our lee.’ First, I doubt a gale would ever be called ‘pleasant’. And ‘lee’ means the side away from the wind (as in the Leeward Islands or in another song, ‘bring your ship under our lee’).” Beware landlubberish poetasters!