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I think that this use of "pre-", especially "pre"ceding
'recorded', came to general usage via the television
industry.
When a program is being recorded, it seems natural and
proper for the talking heads to refer to other
material that they are including as "pre-"recorded.
Who knows? It might have been their lawyers who
prompted them to make special distinction regarding
earlier recorded material being shown/included as
part of the current recording/broadcast. (Don't
get me going about "recorded live"...)
Then, as with just about every bit of butchery
and linguistic buffoonery that I've met over
the past few decades, some bozo tries to sound
important by emulating the usage in unrelated
circumstances. If his (occasionally her) audience
includes the poorly educated or the weak-of-mind,
then he (occasionally she) actually succeeds.
Next thing you know, yet another useful bit of
jargon is pre-empted and co-opted by the great
unwashed, and loses 99.9% of its utility.
My current pet-peeve is the "grammatical" over-
correctors. "The award was given to my wife and I."
"You can see Janey in some of the vacation photos
of Sylvia and I." Yaaaaaaaaaaah! I think my
IQ dropped twelve points just writing the examples!
The sound of fingernails on a blackboard (if you
are old enough to remember such) is positively
musical compared to that kind of failed self-
importance. Hearing it from radio and TV
announcers makes we want to revive the lost
art of assassination or perhaps the code duello.
Of course, it's closely trailed by "Please join
Lisette and myself for the meeting."
And, the ever-popular "You can forward it to myself
for action."
Ok, I'll stop. My teeth are hurting.
/kevin
On Fri, 2002-03-22 at 12:29, Cadorette Johanne wrote:
>
> Interesting.
>
> In my previous post I wrote "our systems are usually shipped pre-installed," but I wouldn't write that professionally. In our doc, I wrote something like we "ship the computer with the software already installed."
>
> However, I just noticed the following sentence in another manual: "the system is shipped with the following pre-recorded voice profiles." If we simply removed "pre-record," the meaning would be just as clear: "the system is shipped with the following voice profiles." Or, would it be better to add "already recorded?"
>
>
--
Kevin McLauchlan
Chrysalis-ITS, Inc.
"Ultimate Trust(TM)"
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PC Magazine gives RoboHelp Office 2002 five stars - a perfect score!
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