I keep receiving credit card notices in the mail telling me that I am PRE-APPROVED for their special cards. The words ‘PRE-APPROVED’ are bolded, larger, and prominent, as though special in their own right.
And yet, upon closer examination, the words are meaningless. I was selected on a pre-approved criteria to apply, and in tiny print I am advised that I may not, in fact, be approved, based on my application information.
Which translated means, “We mailed this to everyone and not everyone will be approved.”
I have noticed the word PRE seems to be everywhere these days. If you fly, you quickly discover that even if you have a First Class ticket and are assigned to boarding line 1, you are NOT the first to board. The airlines have pre-boarding for a whole subset of passengers including military, those requiring assistance, and passengers with young children.
How can you pre-board? The prefix pre means before, so pre-boarding means boarding before you are boarding.
You can preorder, prelaunch, prepay, pre-Black Friday Deals, PreCheck (TSA), prequalify, preinstalled, preconfigured, premixed, preview, pre-labor, and many more.
The movie ‘Minority Report’ used precogs (precognition) humans to detect crime before the crime happened.
PreCheck for TSA is supposed to speed up your passage through security, and yet with more people prechecked, the lines seem just as long, once again.
As an author, I like my words to be literal in meaning, not abstract, and designed to deceive you into reading, and so I take offense to the use of pre-wording to sucker me into taking action. As such I have a tendency to pre-reject anything that comes my way with the above-mentioned prefix.
~ William Gensburger
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