Don’t Say Pre

At home, we live in pre-fabs with pre-schoolers and pre-teens. At play, we watch pre-game shows on TV, and pre-pay for our online pre-registrations. At work, business consultants urge us to (shudder) pre-plan.  As we pre-maturely pre-determine and pre-configure our pre-ferred (furred?) options and look for work-arounds for any pre-existing conditions, sometimes it seems that all of society conspires to reassure us that we can, and should, get ahead of things.

How can we push back? Quite simply.

Don’t say pre.

Of course this usage that shall not be used dated me, but it seems to me that the valence of this occupation has increased in sent times as compared to viously. Maybe it’s because I’m almost historic but it seems ternatural, almost tentious or sumptuous. After all, who are we to think we can ordain or determine outcomes? In this carious world, isn’t it enough to strive to serve our balance?

However innocently this dagnabbed fix started, it’s now officially enough. The liminaries are done: Whatever texts we try to sell others or ourselves, it’s time to start living under a new mise or by a new cept.

As a start, we can stop trying to empt others’ actions based on what we sume will happen. If we’re going from cedent, extrapolating from cursor events to outcomes that we think we can’t pare for and so must vent, we can remind ourselves of two things. First, we might be judging situations without sufficient cision, or based on conceptions, or even grounded in a disposition to dict nasty outcomes. Second, we can remember that posterous results can arise from cipitate action.

Although meditation is not necessarily a requisite or a scription for more thoughtful action, it’s ferable to the opposite. However, I wouldn’t want to clude other approaches judicially. Don’t we all have enough scriptiveness in our lives as it is?

I have a monition or cognition that this ponderant, even eminent, usage is likely to vail unless we take this extreme action. Will it introduce new problems, even new linguistic abominations? I don’t claim to be scient, but I expect the answer is “Yes.” I’d be varicating if I tried to tty that up.