Important notice from the GRAMMAR POLICE. Plz read. This means you.
rufio:
Eh, prepared does not usually mean "arranged beforehand" to me, except in special cases.
"I drank a glass of water I had prepared." = I just now filled it from the sink.
"I drank the prepared glass of water." = Someone else just filled it from the sink.
"I drank a glass of water that had been pre-prepared." = It was sitting out on the counter when I got here.
It's a little weird to talk about glasses of water being prepared anyway, but then again we are talking about strange usage of "water" as a count noun anyway. I'm sure everyone is now going to accuse me of being horribly non-standard. Yawn. I am not interested anymore. Have fun.
Tsarina:
If someone filled the glass BEFORE you were about to drink from it, it would indeed be arranged beforehand. 'Pre-prepared' is a pleonasm. 'Pre' is already a part of the word, and adding another 'pre' is silly if your meaning is any of the definitions mentioned here.
I could understand adding the other 'pre' if you were to express the state the glass was in before it was prepared for you, but that seems a bit muddy, and I'm sure there's a more fitting word for it.
rufio:
Well, as you can see from the etymology in Jordi's cite, "prepare" is not actually an English compound, but was borrowed wholesale from Latin, and English is not Latin, etc., etc. While "prepare" does (to me) mean that the glass was filled before I drank it, it can't be used to mean that it was filled much more than a minute beforehand, and in this case I wanted to say that it had been prepared a long time in advance. (Incidentally, if the "pre" in "prepare" were a standard English prefix, "prepared a long time in advance" would be redundant.)
Does that make more sense to you?
Marhis:
On a side note,
Quote from: rufio on 2009 July 01, 22:10:33
While "prepare" does (to me) mean that the glass was filled before I drank it, it can't be used to mean that it was filled much more than a minute beforehand, and in this case I wanted to say that it had been prepared a long time in advance.
I really don't get why it can't be used to mean that it was filled long time beforehand, regardless it's derived from Latin or not.
rufio:
Heh. Reminds me for conventions for naming important syllables; the fourth-to-last syllable is called the "preantepenult," where they basically just found three different prefixes that meant "before".
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page