The thing about retaliation, as everyone knows, is that you should get it in first. And now there’s a word for that: the eminently logical “pretaliation”. The MP Paul Flynn has been having fun on Twitter by describing Seb Coe’s attempts to defend himself in advance against the report on doping in athletics as “(new word) PRETALIATION”.
It’s not actually a new word. The earliest Google results seem to be for Pretaliation, the noughties heavy metal band, which figures. More recently, the term has arisen in US commercial law to describe onerous employee non-disclosure agreements that seek to circumvent rules against retaliation towards whistleblowers. One might be reminded of the deathly absurdities of military euphemism: the innovation last decade, for instance, of “pre-emptive strike” to denote an attack to defend against something that hasn’t happened yet and probably won’t.
More so than the wonkish “predistribution” in economic policy, “pretaliation” sounds like one of those amusingly counterintuitive constructions that might soon go viral. The problem for civilised discourse, though, might be that if everyone’s trying to get their pretaliation in first, then all discussions on any topic will begin immediately with a barrage of insult and invective, as on Twitter. Still, the word does nicely suggest other forms of getting ahead of a conflict: “preaction” and “presponse”, to name but two.
The writer and actor Alice Lowe is making a film about a pregnant woman on a killing spree entitled “Prevenge”. Maybe we should all premeditate before we get too stressed.
Does the preponderance of novel “pre” words indicate that we are living in the most impatient age ever? Perhaps. In the meantime, creative tennis players might be interested in adopting the “preturn”, in which they whack the ball past the opponent before he has even served.
