Pre-Plan

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Dave. How are you?

Hello, Dave.

Hi, Dave.

Doing well.

Hi. Welcome to the program.

Thank you.

Where are you calling us from?

I’m calling from Connecticut, and I have a question about the word pre-plan.

Pre-plan.

Pre-plan.

Pre-plan.

Pre-plan.

I’m a firefighter.

Very good.

Okay.

And when we sit in operational meetings, the chief will bring up, you know, we have a pre-plan for this incident.

So I asked one day, I said, Chief, how do you pre-plan something?

And he looked at me with a rather quizzical look.

So I said, I’ve got to find out about this word.

And so what should he have said instead of pre-plan?

Well, I don’t know if you could put the prefix pre with plan.

Because isn’t by nature anything you do planning?

So you’re saying it’s redundant.

I would believe so.

Pre-plan has come up before in one of the many ways in which I’ve worked with language over the years.

And so in the digging I’ve done on this, I think I found a pattern for the use of pre-plan, which kind of makes the redundancy okay.

Kind of.

I notice that’s a completely waffly, vague, kind of flip-floppy phrase I put in there.

But there are some caveats and so forth.

But I think it kind of makes it okay.

And this is that when you are planning, you can plan at any time.

You can plan on the spot for something you’re going to do in just a moment or that you’re actually currently doing, or you can plan well in advance.

There’s this whole chronological range of times when you can plan.

But it looks like, according to the usage that I can see and that I’ve encountered in day-to-day life, that when people pre-plan, it’s almost always well in advance of when they’re actually going to use that plan.

And now, I don’t know if this is something that people have done because they realize that pre-planning is a little redundant.

And so they’ve sought to make sure there’s some difference between pre-plan and plan.

And people do that with language.

When there are two words that seem to serve the same function, people will often, in their heads, make one word mean slightly different thing than the other thing.

So the question that I most often hear this is people asking about pre-boarding in the airport.

And people, they’re like, well, that’s redundant because you’re either boarding or you’re not.

You’re not pre-boarding.

You can’t really pre-board.

But if you look at the way they use it in the airport, it’s almost always you’re doing things in preparation for the actual moment of boarding.

There is actually some kind of pre-action happening there.

Like you are folding up the baby stroller or you are tagging the extra bags or you are rolling the person in the wheelchair up to the gate so that you can take that extra time, that extra moment to gather them up and bring them to their seat, that sort of thing.

And then folding, you know, I just feel like there is a little, there’s a differentiation here that’s happening, a subtlety.

I will, however, say that I, at the base of it, avoid both words.

I mean, it’s the kind of thing.

Pre-boarding?

Yeah, pre-board or pre-plan.

I avoid saying both of them.

Yeah.

Well, I kind of asked Chief, I said, isn’t it by nature what we’re doing, we’re planning for this?

Yeah.

And what he said.

And, you know, I’ve been in other meetings with my captains and stuff, and, you know, all right, sir, well, we’re going to plan for this.

And, you know, well, we have a pre-plan already drawn up.

Well, how do you draw up a pre-plan, sir?

It’s a plan to make a plan.

Because it’s all the prefix and the word plan going together.

You know, I end up post-planning a lot.

I should have done that.

Well, then, all right, then how does one post-plan?

Exactly.

Pre-plan? Can’t you post-plan something?

Well, yeah.

Post-planning is 2020.

Yeah, right. Monday morning quarterbacking.

Monday morning post-planning.

Yeah. But, Grant, Dave can’t avoid this because his boss is telling him.

Yeah. Well, here’s the thing, Dave.

The course of action that I take on this is I avoid it in my own speech, and I forgive it in the speech of others.

Okay.

It’s kind of harmless.

All right.

And he’s your boss.

Yes.

Right. And so when you take his job one day, then you’ll have to put an edict out, put a big plaque on the wall.

No more pre-planning. We’re only planning.

I don’t want his job.

I’ve seen his stress.

I don’t want his job.

Well, I hope we’ve helped some, Dave.

Take care of yourself.

You’ve clarified the mud.

Thank you, sir.

All right.

Thank you very much.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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