In reply to MM0FMF:
I don’t believe it is necessarily tautology. It is just a way of differentiating all be it in an possibly ambiguous way.
Pre-Release Order We simply drop the word release.
Advance order or advanced booking might be considered better English, but then to order or to book always implies we will get it sometime in the future and not right now.
Language should be considered a living thing and what is correct English today bears very little resemblance to that of even fifty years ago.
“Am I bovered?”
In reply to GW7AAV:
There aren’t really degrees of “ordered” though. Either you have ordered an item in that you have entered into a contract to eventually purchase or you haven’t. People use the term pre-order when they mean order.
I’ll accept there are varieties of order involving nothing more than an expression of interest with the onus on the shopkeeper to contact you when he either has stock or knows when he will have stock. Or going as far as the purchaser making a non-refundable deposit with many variations in between.
The term pre-order is something of a recent phenomenon and tends to be used by people who don’t know what it may or may not mean. Whenever I hear someone say they have pre-ordered something I ask them to explain what they mean and they describe the placing of an order. When I point out that they have merely ordered something they agree that they only used the term pre-order because they’d heard it used and didn’t know what it really meant as opposed to using the word order!
Sorry for being a pedant but I’m here at work waiting for IT to pull its collective thumbs out somewhere sensitive and fix my login issues so I have nothing else to do! I can log into my Windows PC and not access any servers, or I can log into the Linux machines and not access any Windows stuff. As I need to use both now I cannot do any work! It happened to colleague last week when he had to change a time-expired password and the goons haven’t found out why there where problems then. Still it beats working for a living, sit here using a Linux laptop, surf the web and get paid for it.
:-;
Andy
MM0FMF