Preheating

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name’s Sarah from Dallas.

Hiya, Sarah from Dallas.

What’s up?

So I have a question. My boyfriend is from Russia, and we have this debate going. He thinks that the word preheat or preheated is incorrect. When you’re talking about, like, preheating an oven, in recipe directions, he feels that you can’t heat something before you heat it. The directions should just say heat your oven to whatever temperature. And I have told him that I feel like it’s, you know, they’re telling you to do it ahead of time. But he feels like if it’s directions and it’s the first direction, then that should be the first thing you do.

So he’s saying that Russian doesn’t have an equivalent of preheat. Is that right?

I don’t think so. I think that he just feels like the prefix pre is unnecessary and incorrect.

Yeah, I’m going to take, and I assume that you’re not agreeing with him.

No, I’m not.

So we have this debate going because I feel like it’s telling you to do it ahead of time.

So you need to agree.

Yeah.

So what’s on the line? And is one of you baking something for the other?

I don’t know. It’s just a who’s right. And I’m going to go see him this weekend in Russia.

Oh, nice.

Able to tell him that I was right.

You will be, because you are right. You’re 100% right. The problem that he’s got is he’s breaking the word down into its components of pre and heat, and assuming that when we talk about pre meaning before, it means before heating, but it doesn’t. If you actually reverse those words and think about it as heating before, we are heating before we do something else. The pre and the heat go together. They perform a single word with a single concrete idea. He can reanalyze the component parts all that he wants, but it doesn’t change the meaning. We see this also in prepay. Prepay works the same way. It doesn’t mean that we’re paying before we’re paying. It means we’re paying in advance of something else. We also have it in pre-plan. We took a call about this a while back on the show. When you pre-plan, you’re planning before you do something else. You’re not planning before you’re planning. So that’s how English works. That’s the morphology of English. He’s not really going to change that, but he can try to spoon the ocean as much as he wants. He’s just not going to get anywhere.

All right.

Well, that’s kind of what I thought. But so what you’re saying, though, is it’s one whole word.

So you really can’t break it down.

Yeah, it’s one whole word. And it relates to what you do before you put the food in.

Yeah.

Right?

Before you put something in the oven.

Yeah, you’re preheating it. Because here’s the problem with his argument. Let’s just say that he’s right. And he goes ahead and he makes a recipe and he says, heat the oven to 400. He’s going to have a world full of cooks and chefs and folks who are going, wait a second. Do I put the casserole in and then heat it up to 400 or do I heat it up in advance to 400? And so when you say preheat, you remove that question completely from people’s minds. So it’s becoming more specific.

Very specific.

Yeah. Because in his mind, the recipe goes in order.

But that’s true. That would be a question.

Well, Sarah, how much does he cook?

Yeah, there we go.

That’s a good question.

He doesn’t.

Okay.

Ding, ding, ding, ding.

Bingo.

Okay. I cook quite a bit, and you can tell your boyfriend also, if he is only doing things in order, he’s got a problem. There are a lot of things happening at once. The oven is heating. The jello is setting. The ice is hardening. Whatever. All this stuff happens at once before you get to the final moment where everything shows up on the table.

Well, then I am glad that I’m right. I’m going to tell him all about it. And then we’ll move on to the next language argument, and it’ll be great.

Sarah, I want you to email us or call us again and tell us how it went and let us know if he wants to talk to us because we really want to get his perspective on this too.

Okay?

I have a feeling he’ll have an opinion.

I’ll definitely email you. Strong-willed people are good partners, but boy, they’re a lot of work.

They are.

Thank you so much.

Thanks, Sarah.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, Sarah.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

So we’d love to solve your relationship problems. Just call us, if it’s about language, 877-929-9673, or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org.