Playing with words: PRE- or POST-?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On April 20, 2018 I blogged about Playing with words: PRO or CON? For next week’s meeting of my Toastmasters club I am the Grammarian and need to introduce a vocabulary Word of the Week. That word is concise. But procise isn’t a real word for its opposite. Similarly we can take a playful look at the prefixes for before (PRE-) and after (POST-).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

English isn’t symmetrical. As shown above in a table of pairs where real words are green and unreal ones are red, it is not common for there to be words beginning with both prefixes. Two exceptions are preposition and postposition (with the latter being obscure) & premature and postmature (with the latter an uncommon medical term).

 

Why do they call it postage? You have to put the stamp on a letter before you can mail it. (It’s not preage). Language can be precise, but it isn’t postcise. You can prefer something, but don’t postfer it. When you give a speech, you present, but later don’t postsent. Your backside is your posterior. But the opposite of posterior is not preerior, it’s anterior (which I learned as medical terminology).