I see no reason to adhere to that stricture.
Anyway, in my view, the companion to “prior to” is “subsequent to,” not “posterior to.”
David Foster Wallace on prior to:
The take away? Don’t be an agent of the evil that is all around us by using prior to.
DFW discusses this, too.
The takeaway? If you look at the latin roots, posterior to is the companion to prior to.
What I takeaway is the Wallace is a snob/reverse-snob-poseur-jackass of the highest order.
What supreme irony that on the one had he condemns puffery on the one hand and then appeals to Latin roots to evaluate the appropriateness of “subsequent.”
And then his argument is 100 percent fallacious and he refers to it as a grammatical issue, which it’s not.
An agent of light and goodness, my posterior.
Um, it’s pretty obvious DFW is not being completely serious in that video.
It’s not obvious to me. And it’s not the first time someone would have said something like that with complete sincerity.
And if he is joshing, then all the more reason to ignore this rule.
Shouldn’t that be “Chong to his Cheech?”
There’s a flawed argument if ever I saw one. Funnily enough, not all words come equally unscathed through a 2000 year old adoption process. Prior still has pretty much the same meaning as it had in latin, whereas (rather fittingly for this thread) posterior is now more commonly used to refer to arse. Words change when they’re inherited. Would you talk about “the alchemist” even though “al” means “the”? Course you would, because that’s how it’s transformed over time. See also “the hoi polloi”, strictly translating to “the the many”. Shit changes. Deal with it.
As for the link, so one particular writer thinks that “prior to” is “puffed up”. Tough shit. Excluding all words and phrases with the same meaning other than the very shortest or simplest available would be one fucker of a way to strip some of the best flair and flavour from a language.
Yip, just like we can say ATM machine and PIN number.
d&r
Funny, I thought we were speaking English. Caput tuum in ano est.
Around here, we tend to call them TYME machines. It confuses the hell out of anybody not local.
Awesome.
My aunt ran into problems when she moved out to California about 20 years ago.
“Excuse me, where’s the TYME machine?”
“… Well what time do you want to go to, honey?”
Except there is no flair or flavor to prior to. It is a stilted, ugly phrase.
In short then, you don’t like a phrase that is perfectly valid within standard rules of grammar.
As complaints go, this one is somewhat lacking in the trouser department.
Romanes eunt domus
That’s off too. “Prior” and “subsequent” are good adjectives. But they’re not working as adjectives in those constructions. What exactly are they doing?
Thou unmuzzled fool-born maumet, woefully confused between definite and indefinite articles!
Back to the OP topic,
Yes, works for me that way. Compare it with “for.”
I’m afraid I’m not following your point here.
Are you suggesting that “prior to” and “subsequent to” are not common phrases, or that prior and subsequent aren’t opposites?
And whilst it’s been a long time since I did English at school, I believe both would be classified as a prepositional phrase functioning as an adjective. Someone better informed can correct/confirm that though.
Neither. I’m suggesting that they don’t exactly make sense, in terms of what those words mean when “to” isn’t appended to them.
Can you think of a comparable construction, involving some other adjective plus “to,” that functions with elegance?