Talk:preprepare

This word is a self-contained redundancy or contradiction. The word prepare means "make ready in advance". "Preprepare" would have to mean something like "prior to making ready in advance". That would have to mean "before preparing", or "not preparing".

This word seems to have popped up because, due to pronunciation, people have lost sight of the fact that the "pre" prefix in the word "prepare" means "before" or "earlier". Marmocet (talk) 10:21, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

If I normally prepare something at 12 o'clock, but today I do it at 11, I'm prepreparing. Equinox ◑ 10:34, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

No, you're preparing it earlier than usual. Marmocet (talk) 10:38, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

I think nonstandard is right here. Mglovesfun (talk) 10:42, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

No, I don't think so. To prepare can mean to put things together - to "compose" or "construct". So to "preprepare" is to do it before some other process. SemperBlotto (talk) 10:48, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

If I'm going to prepare a meal, I need to prepare and assemble my ingredients and get out the proper utensils so I don't have to hunt for them when there are other things to attend to- the mise en place. That could be described as prepreparing. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:12, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Since preparing your meal inherently involves assembling ingredients (as well as any other set of actions you may feel you need to undertake to complete the process, like cooking and serving), this act is simply part of preparing your meal.

Note that "to prepare" can entail any action or sequence of actions required, as someone else pointed out, to achieve some desired state of the world. Take this example: "In response to the weight of the barbarian assault, Scipio gave the order for his men to fall back to their prepared line of defenses." Why not "preprepared" line of defenses? They were certainly made ready in advance (i.e., before the said assault), so the definition of the word "preprepare" given here would seem to apply. The answer is that to prepare already means "to make ready in advance". By extension, "prepared" thus means "made ready in advance". Preparation inherently takes place before the fact, since it entails actions that have duration, and because it is not logically possible to prepare after the fact.

Someone else proposed that if preparing consists of a sequence of distinct actions, those actions qualify as "prepreparation". Using the reasoning that underpins "preprepare", and extending on my above example such that prepared defenses become "preprepared" defenses, selecting terrain would be an example of preprepreprepreparing, deploying troops would be prepreprepreparing, and constructing field fortifications would be preprepreparing, and all three actions would serve the end of prepreparing defensive lines. The absurdity in this arises because these three actions were actually part of a single process - getting defenses ready in advance.

I agree that this is not a word. There is a temporal component to the word "prepare". The word implies that you are undertaking an action or a set of actions in the present in order to achieve a desired state of the world at some point in the future. That temporal component is encapsulated in the "pre" prefix of the word "prepare." Adding a second "pre" to the word renders the word self-redundant and illogical. This is an attempt to draw a distinction without a difference. HelenMiller (talk) 20:38, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

It clearly is a word since it is in use; try searching Google Books to find some publications. It might not be very common, and you personally might not like it. Equinox ◑ 07:59, 10 April 2013 (UTC)

Agreed. If people say it, it's a word. For my part, I move that this word be placed into the category "nonstandard" (per my original edit) because it is a pleonasm that, though it can be attested (as can words like "irregardless"), has not become part of common usage.

If, on the other hand, it is felt that this word should be regarded as standard, then perhaps the Boy Scouts should consider updating their motto to "Be Preprepared". And perhaps for clarity's sake, they should add "ahead of time, preferably."

You agree it's "not a word", but then you refer to it as a word. The "temporal component" you talk about in (deprecated template usage) prepare is irrelevant: this is the Etymological fallacy. You are perfectly free to dislike the word and consider it illogical, but that has nothing to do with a dictionary's job of documenting its use. Ƿidsiþ 08:18, 10 April 2013 (UTC)

+1. OED Online has pre-prepare, not marked as nonstandard, with citations. Is that not enough? --Hyarmendacil (talk) 21:52, 11 April 2013 (UTC)

Pragmatics

From Schegloff (1980)’s pre-pre. JMGN (talk) 18:14, 14 March 2023 (UTC)