The enlightening and entertaining column by the Grammarnatrix last week on antiautonyms, which show up for high school students in Macbeth’s claim that sleep “knits up the raveled sleeve of care,” got the Grammarnator thinking of a related issue: people’s misunderstanding of the prefix pre-.
Now, we all know that pre- means before. And as surely as night follows day (not really; it’s all a continuum, with day just as much following night), everyone has their Eureka! moment when they say, “the recipe calls for preheating the oven, but you can’t heat it before you heat it. Shouldn’t it just say ‘heat the oven’?” By the same token, you can’t see something before you see it, so how you can you preview it?
Preheat does mean heat before, but before doing something else – i.e. putting in the casserole or the roast or the cake. Likewise with preview. That usually implies one of two things. One is to see partially, in order to evaluate by looking at a sample, before seeing completely. That’s what we used to do in theaters when they showed “Previews of Coming Attractions.” Now those snippets, going on much too long and revealing far too much all the time, are called trailers, even those they precede everything else. Go figure!
The other meaning is to see once completely, usually privately, before a subsequent viewing. Thus, a parent watches a movie to determine if it is suitable for her child, and a teacher watches one to develop study guides and assessment methods before he shows it to a class. If he doesn’t, he could be endangering his job.
We see this sense of pre- implying a different activity to follow most clearly in predict. The person making a prediction isn’t saying something before he says it. He is saying that a something more than mere saying will happen in the future. I can say that the Patriots will win their fourth Super Bowl next season. I will have foretold that however, only if they do it.
