As A Metaphor, It's Maybe a 3-and-a-Half

[Charles Doyle]

"Preplan" (or "pre-plan") has always struck me as redundant, but it's well attested and at least as old as the 19th century, the OED shows.

To be symmetrical, the local school district here holds "postplanning" sessions for teachers at the end of the school year. The OED does not record that term. "Postplan" gets 3,670 raw Google hits (123 in Google Books), "postplanning" 1,540 raw Google hits (113 in Google Books). I don't know how to search "pre-plan" or "pre-planning" effectively.

--Charlie
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---- Original message ----
>Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:42:16 +0900
>From: Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>Subject: Re: As A Metaphor, It's Maybe a 3-and-a-Half
>
>
>At 9:37 AM -0400 7/22/08, Doug Harris wrote:

>>The second sentence in the following quote, from a 7/22 LA Times story on the importance of pre-planning a transition from one US president to another, begs a question: When _can_ you build a plane while flying it? (Answer, if it's a space station - which isn't a plane, but that's about as near as you can come to being able to build a flying object while it's doing so.)
>>dh

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