Have you noticed how accountants like the expression ‘write it’. They first took the word ‘down’ and tagged it on the end, copying the expression ‘write it down’, probably learnt at school as one of their first instructions given by their teachers. At school it referred to something that needed recording to reflect its value. So, of course, they then decided to adopt it as an accounting term to mean ‘reduce in value’.
Accountants have decreed that their ‘write it down’ follows the English grammar rules in the use of the word ‘reduce’. Reduce can be used with both ‘by’ and ‘to’ in, for instance ‘reduce by 30%’ or ‘reduce to 50’. Write it down is the same. Write it down by 30% is the accounting equivalent in jargon. But ‘down by’ brings memories of down by the river. ‘Down to’ brings memories of weekends with the family walking down to the same river. And then, there is, ‘down from’, bringing back memories of visits by my cousins in the summer, when they came down from Scotland.
But I digress. Having invented ‘write it down’ accountants then thought about the opposite which led them logically to ‘write it up’. Write it up can also be used with both ‘by’, ‘to’ and ‘from’. Write it up by £30 works, as does write it up to £30 with a different meaning and write it up from £30, though rarely used, does exist.
What should we do when a value is written down to zero? (We are still with accountants). They must have thought of ‘write it down to zero’ but considered this too unwieldy. They then perhaps considered ‘write it away’ or ‘write it under’. In the end they chose ‘write it off’.
But they are not logical. The opposite of ‘write it off’ should be ‘write it on’ or ‘write it on again’. However, accountants decided on an illogical ‘write it back’. Having decided on that, can we assume they have precluded any possibility of using the expression ‘write it forward’? We shall see!
