Language

I know I sound like an old man in saying this, but I'm tired of the deterioration of language. The one that really gets me is the use of "pre." What does this mean? It means to do before. Prevenient grace, is the grace that comes before. "Pre" cannot be added to just anything.

Last night on one of my favorite shows, they said they were going to preassemble bookcases before taking them to a house. They weren't preassembling the bookcases, they were assembling them. Now if they were doing it make sure they fit together properly and then took them apart and then reassembled them, then maybe you could say they were preassembled. But, even that is a stretch. You also cannot preboard an airplane. That would mean you were going to get on before you got on. If people are boarding before everyone else then they are boarding first, they are not preboarding.

Another pet peeve with the airlines is changing nouns into verbs. You cannot "deplane." You can depart, leave, exit, evacuate, etc., a plane but you cannot deplane.

Finally, let's please stop adding "gate" to every scandal that comes up. Watergate was the name of the hotel that was broken into, it was not some special name created for the scandal. Let's not be so unoriginal that we can't at least try and be creative in thinking of new names, or maybe just call it what it actually is rather than just adding "gate" to everything. Besides, it was almost 40 years ago, surely we can think of more recent scandals to use. How about we add "ski" to the end of everything a la Monica? The problem of course is that she became Lewinskigate.