"prior to"

Ken Pizzini ken at halcyon.com
Tue Jan 13 11:54:19 UTC 1998


> Can the three-syllable, two-word, pretentious Bureauspeak
> "prior to" please be eliminated from all tz-file comments and
> documentation (unless it's a quote) and universally replaced
> by the two-syllable, one-word "before" of identical me aning?

There is a shade of meaning difference between the two: in
non-technical situations the term "before" can be used to
mean "up to and including", whereas "prior to" never seems
to accrete the "including" meaning.

This is not to say that changing the term is necessarily a
bad thing, just that care should be taken in the replacment
that it remain clear that "before" is used in the strict
sense.  Sometimes a sentence may need reworking beyond the
proposed substitution in order to avoid confusion on this
point.

		--Ken Pizzini



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