List this under "More Non-Words." I just can't take the inanity of all these new products being "preannounced." Yes, I said "preannounced."
It's useless "smart-speak" (words some person makes up in an attempt to sound smarter than they actually are), often used when a new product, especially a tech product, is introduced. Today it was about a new monitor from Apple. A number of websites have loads of information about the newer, better monitor. But because it won't be in stores until September, they say Apple "preannounced" the product. Smart-speak.
Apple ANNOUNCED the product. How can you actually "preannounce" it? i can't think of a single use of that as a verb. Or anything else, for that matter.
Two questions: 1) how can we stop these tech writers before this plague spreads further? And 2) if we can't stop them, can we kill them?
I can think of one legitimate use of the word pre-announce. In the corporate world, when management is planning an internal action that will be unpopular with its employees, such as a layoff, or salary freeze, or a plant closure, it is a common practice to leak that information intentionally as a rumor a few days prior to making any official announcement of the bad news. I'm sure they have their reasons, and can point to many studies performed by consultants that enumerate the benefits of this practice.
One could call such an action a pre-announcement and could easily say that management pre-announced the salary freeze by starting rumors.
I happen to be a tech writer, but please don't kill me.
Regarding the sorry state of much tech writing these days (especially owner manuals, "help" files, and press releases) I can tell you that most of that stuff is written in-house by people who are not really "tech writers." And this has been going on for some time, so it can't be blamed on the economic downturn and staff reductions. A good tech writer can get $50/hour for simple stuff, and up to $100+/hour for specialized content like medicine or law. But since there's rarely enough writing to employ a tech writer full-time (unless you're IBM or Microsoft or Apple), much of that work is farmed out to freelancers like me ... unless somebody in-house feels qualified to do it. And that's what happens on many website, like those imajoebob referred to.
I don't like the word "preannounce" (or pre-announce) either. Glen makes a good case for it, but why not just use the already good word "leak" ???
"Preannounce" sounds to me like "at that point in time" or other such careless or intentionally pompous-sounding constructions.
Mind you, I endorse neither the practice nor the word. I think both are suspect and distasteful.
Glenn said:
I can think of one legitimate use of the word pre-announce. In the corporate world, when management is planning an internal action that will be unpopular with its employees, such as a layoff, or salary freeze, or a plant closure, it is a common practice to leak that information intentionally as a rumor a few days prior to making any official announcement of the bad news. I'm sure they have their reasons, and can point to many studies performed by consultants that enumerate the benefits of this practice.
One could call such an action a pre-announcement and could easily say that management pre-announced the salary freeze by starting rumors.
Sorry, that's simply two separate announcements. You didn't "preannounce" the layoffs to the first group, you just announced it. You later announced it to everyone else.