Yes, this comes from George Carlin’s bit about airline language.
Isn’t he right, though?
Example:
I go to Amazon to “pre-order” the next Stephen King Dark Tower book. Well, it’s not like I do that and when the book is available, they let me know and THEN I order it, right? I’ve placed the order.
Granted, I’ve placed the order prior to the book’s availability, so why not say that?
Same thing goes for “preheating” an oven. You’re heating the oven. You are actually getting the oven to the correct cooking temperature prior to starting the cooking process.
From a grammatical POV, isn’t using “pre-” with a verb incorrect?
If there is something wrong with it, then the error started in Latin which uses prae- this way quite often. There are numerous words related to those in English like presume or prepare.
Do you think it should be used in a way that is closer to the nouns with a pre- prefix or avoided completely?
But then, why is prepare (“pre-make-ready”) legal, but not pre-order?
Whether you consider a latin (-derived) prefix with an English word good style is a different question but I don’t think there is anything wrong with it from a technical standpoint.
“Pre-” means “before.” When used with a noun, usually an event, it literally means “the time before the event”, i.e., pre-trial, pre-flight, pre-shoot, pre-discovery, etc. because it’s so literal it’s not often questioned.
Used with a verb in the present tense typically imples some sort of antecented action that is different from how you would normally do things. When you pre-order a book or car, the item you’ve ordered usually isn’t even available to be shipped yet. When you pre-heat an oven, you’re heating an EMPTY oven before the food goes in, assuring the oven reaches the correct temperature first.
Consider also that correctness becomes more acceptable once the verb is in the past tense: previewed, prefabricated, predetermined.
I think this is exactly the point. Whenever you use “pre-” with a verb, you’re doing it BEFORE something else, but not necessarily before doing the SAME thing again. I suppose you could be more verbose and thus more accurate, but really, when COULDN’T you?
Yes, but you lose context (probably not in all cases though). If you say “I’m ordering this book,” and I say “I’m pre-ordering that book,” you know that book hasn’t been released yet.
No it doesn’t. “Pre-heating” comes from the adjectival “pre-heated oven”, ie an oven heated before cooking commences. “Pre-boarding” means just that - prior to boarding. From the point of view of the retailer, “pre-ordering” is very different to regular orders.
Saying “I’m predisposed to understanding the nuances of this kind of odd parsing of word meaning” is NOT the same as saying “I’m disposed to understanding the nuances of this odd parsing of word meaning.” You lose the implicit meaning that this has happened to you before.
In German pre- (prä-, actually) is only used with words derived from Latin and those are less common than in English. However German prefixes are used all the time. e.g. pre-heat is vorheizen, pre-order is vorbestellen. Both are perfectly normal German words. The preposition vor on its own means before or in front of. The endless German compound nouns are relatively well-known, but you can also form new verbs on the fly using modification (or - less likely this way round - derivation) suffixes and prefixes.