Preventive vs. Preventative

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Erin, calling from Fort Worth, Texas.

Welcome to the show.

Hi, Martha. Hi, Grant. It’s so good to get to talk to you. I listen to you religiously, and I appreciate the fact that you entertain us and educate us every week. That’s a gift, so thank you.

Oh, gosh.

Ooh, it’s working.

Thank you so much.

Thanks, Erin. How can we help you? What’s on your mind?

Well, I need your help to understand whether a commonly used word is correct or not. In my field, I’m in the field of public health. Obviously, prevention is ubiquitous in what we do. And I’m on the academic side. So I teach and I research. And I have a question about the word preventive, or rather the alternative word, which is preventative. Is this word preventative correct? Because as I understand it, the word is preventive. In formal writing, you see preventive. And in academic departments, the title is Preventive, Department of Preventive Medicine. But in common speech, you hear this word preventative all the time. And you’re seeing it more and more in writing. And so is it also like a second correct form of preventive or is it incorrect?

Wow, you laid out the question very well. Nicely put. Now, you have an answer to that. What is your opinion? Now, you’re in a position where you control or grade or judge the writing of other people, right?

That’s correct.

Okay, so what do you think?

Well, when you come up through your own academic training, you’re trained along this series of do’s and don’ts in your own writing. And so then you transfer it on to your students. And I was always trained that the word is preventive. And I used to work in a research center. We had a science writer. And she certainly felt the word was preventive, and nothing was getting across her desk that was preventative. So I would explain this to my students that because you see this, this is not necessarily the correct word. But then I saw so many good students toggle between the words preventive and preventative within a single paper that I decided to go online. And I just went to an online dictionary, and the word preventative was in there next to preventive. So then it made me question if my opinion of what was right really is, or if it was kind of like this word normalcy, which isn’t really the word, but it became the word because we use the incorrect word so often. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

There’s a kind of a tangle here. We use a different word more often. You have to be careful with that word incorrect because the language as a whole doesn’t care one way or the other which word you use. The language includes them both. It’s a personal or institutional decision as to whether or not you use a word. And you’re in an interesting position, Aaron, because you represent the institutional voice and the people that you work with. And so you do have the right to say, please use the word preventive and not the word preventative, even though it’s a real word and all the dictionaries include it. So you have that right to just make that judgment call and go forth. But I don’t want to say that if that’s a perfectly valid word to use. And I don’t want to count it as incorrect.

Yeah, perfectly. That’s what I want to understand.

Perfectly. Is this okay?

Let’s talk about that adjective for a second, Martha. Perfectly because there are some problems with preventative, but most of them have to do with the judgments of other speakers of English. And that’s where you’re getting kind of tangled up here, Erin, right? If I say preventative, Martha might look at me and go and think, maybe even without saying, but think, oh, preventive is the word that he meant. I wonder about this man’s intelligence, right? Well, I don’t know about that. I do know that preventive is far, far, far more common. Like three to one or four to one, right? Yeah, depending on, and especially in this country. In Britain, it’s not quite that much of a difference.

Preventative is more common.

Yeah. Yeah.

They mean the same thing. There’s no contextual difference as far as I know.

Yeah. But it’s this weird group of words. I mean, we could get argumentative about it.

Right.

But actually, it’s argumentative, right?

Right.

Or representative.

And we could also make a qualitative or qualitative judgment about it.

Right.

But you’re looking for the authoritative or authoritative voice on this, aren’t you?

Exactly. That’s what I was thinking.

So we’re joking here because this kind of comes up again and again. We have these two different ways of ending certain words and end with a D or a T sound. And the short answer here is both words are really part of English, but there are judgments made against the people who say or write preventative, and your students would be best to avoid it, just so that somebody isn’t going to start questioning their intelligence or the content of their message just because they made a simple word choice. And that’s really what it boils down to. Do you want to cloud your message and confuse the minds of your readers who will start to doubt you by boldly choosing this word? Or do you want to choose a word that they will safely never notice except to read it and absorb its meaning?

That is extremely helpful.

That’s exactly what I needed to know.

Great.

Thank you so much.

Glad to help.

Let us know how it turns out. Give us an update in a little bit, will you?

Yeah.

Will do.

Thanks for your work.

Thanks, Erin.

Thank you very much.

Take care now.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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