{"id":244,"date":"2008-05-26T12:00:42","date_gmt":"2008-05-26T18:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kirkmahoney.com\/blog\/2008\/05\/it-wasnt-something-i-pre-planned\/"},"modified":"2008-05-26T12:10:27","modified_gmt":"2008-05-26T18:10:27","slug":"it-wasnt-something-i-pre-planned","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kirkmahoney.com\/wordpress\/blog\/2008\/05\/it-wasnt-something-i-pre-planned\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;It wasn&#8217;t something I pre-planned.&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I heard this a couple of days ago while watching a History Channel program on the <a target=\"_new\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ark_of_the_Covenant\">Ark of the Covenant<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Problem:<\/strong><br \/>\nThe verb &#8220;pre-planned&#8221; is a nonsense word.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Explanation:<\/strong><br \/>\nThe &#8220;pre&#8221; in &#8220;pre-planned&#8221; is redundant, just as the &#8220;back&#8221; in &#8220;return back&#8221; is redundant.<\/p>\n<p>To <em>plan<\/em> something is to do think about something <em>before<\/em> it occurs.<\/p>\n<p>The &#8220;pre&#8221; prefix also means <em>before<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>It makes no sense to think about something <em>before before<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>For fun, I searched Google for each of the following words (with the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;planned&#8221; &#8212; 155,000,000 matches<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;pre-planned&#8221; &#8212; 1,400,000 matches<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This tells me that Web authors have avoided this &#8220;pre-&#8221; redundancy by a ratio of almost 111:1, which is good but not great, especially in light of over one million(!) &#8220;pre-planned&#8221; matches.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Solution:<\/strong><br \/>\n&#8220;It wasn&#8217;t something I planned.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I heard this a couple of days ago while watching a History Channel program on the Ark of the Covenant. Problem: The verb &#8220;pre-planned&#8221; is a nonsense word. Explanation: The &#8220;pre&#8221; in &#8220;pre-planned&#8221; is redundant, just as the &#8220;back&#8221; in &#8220;return back&#8221; is redundant. To plan something is to do think about something before it&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-common-english-blunders","category-redundancies"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>&quot;It wasn&#039;t something I pre-planned.&quot; - Kirk Mahoney . com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.kirkmahoney.com\/wordpress\/blog\/2008\/05\/it-wasnt-something-i-pre-planned\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"&quot;It wasn&#039;t something I pre-planned.&quot; - Kirk Mahoney . com\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I heard this a couple of days ago while watching a History Channel program on the Ark of the Covenant. 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