prehumous

English

Etymology

By analogy with posthumous, replacing post- with pre-.

Adjective

prehumous (not comparable)

1. Before death.
   • 1859, “The National Portrait Gallery”, in The Art-Journal, London: James S. Virtue;  […], New York, page 348, column 2:

     There are certainly the portraits of men among them who, like the bad king that, according to his prehumous epitaph, never did a good thing, and therefore have no business in the good company in which we find them.

   • 1885 January 24, “To Correspondents”, in Saladin, editor, The Secular Review: A Journal of Agnosticism, volume XVI, number 4, London, page 57, column 2:

     S. Hartley.—The reading public is only too prone to give posthumous laurels to those to whom it would hardly give prehumous bread. As far as his fame is concerned, William Maccall has the misfortune not to be in his grave. Many run out into the wilderness to meet B. V., and, behold, a greater than B. V. is here, although B. V. is undoubtedly great.

   • 1888 January 7, “A Veteran Philanthropist”, in Harper’s Weekly: A Journal of Civilization, volume XXXII, number 1620, page 6, column 1:

     He [William Wilson Corcoran] is a rare instance of prehumous liberality, having given away in his lifetime, it is said on good authority, at least $5,000,000.

   • 1918, Vanity Fair, page 110:

     From the prehumous correspondence of Mr. Tarkington which was brought to light by the whole sad business, Mr. Corbin concluded that the creator of Penrod, like the creator of Long John Silver, considered the drama an inferior form of expression.

   • 1952, The Saturday Evening Post, page 134:

     “Aye aye, sir,” said Weems gloomily. “A beach room without beer, blondes or any berserkity.” / “That’s my boy,” said the commander approvingly. “Your posthumous awards will make history, John.” / “I prefer prehumous beer and blondes,” Weems said, and cut the motor and they glided […]

   • 1954, Post Stories, New York, N.Y.: Random House, page 154:

     “Who’s Mike Dunham?” / “Me,” he said calmly. “You see, I’m a painter—or will be one of these days. Probably after I’m dead. But I can’t wait till then to enjoy it. So I figure a little prehumous appreciation of the fact is in order.”

   • 1955 December 5, “The Watch Spring”, in Time: The Weekly Newsmagazine, page 94, column 3:

     When a friend warned Paul Kayser, president of El Paso Natural Gas Co., that his blistering pace would one day make him “fly apart like a watch spring,” the 68-year-old Kayser coolly replied: “Hell, when I die I’ll run 15 years on momentum.” / Last week Paul Kayser increased his prehumous momentum. The Federal Power Commission authorized El Paso to go into a $194 million expansion program, including construction of a 413-mile pipeline from Colorado and New Mexico’s San Juan Basin to the Arizona-California border.

   • 1959 August, Road & Track, page 17, column 2:

     This award, which turned out to be prehumous, had an odd result.

   • 1965, Poland, page 16, column 1:

     EDGAR: Your “prehumous” gift…

   • 1965, Joseph Goldstein, Jay Katz, The Family and the Law: Problems for Decision in the Family Law Process, The Free Press, page 510:

     My daughter, who is the mother of two fine prehumous boys asks: “But suppose an astronaut is killed in orbital flight, why should his widow want to have a child after his death?”

   • 1966, Igor Stravinsky, Robert Craft, Themes and Episodes, New York, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, page 148:

     Ormandy, who gave the Philadelphia Orchestra a chinchilla echo, and who is an ideal conductor of Johann Strauss, as well as a specialist in posthumous music such as Tchaikovsky’s Seventh (and even in such prehumous music as Webern’s Im Sommerwind); […]

   • 1971, The Art Gallery, page 32, column 2:

     ALEX KATZ edited by Bill Berkson and Irving Sandler. Praeger. $12.50 / Very little book for the price, unless you are passionately interested in the work of Alex Katz — or, rather, the gossip that seems to flow endlessly out of, within and around Katz’s close circle of admirers, many of whom are contributors to this prehumous eulogy.

   • 1971, Thus Spake the Eyes, page 62:

     Penetrating the battalion of poetic portrayal, when he reached across the threshold of the Padmini of utterance, he discovered to his dismay, that she had become Sati by subjecting herself to the prehumous cremation of cogitation.

   • 1975, The Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal, page 283:

     Prehumous bequests should be made to the Hon. Club Undertaker, R. Gall Inglis.

   • 1976, John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, →ISBN, page 148:

     My further presupposition is that the future of Christian theology will demand of us a God who does not grant one eternal life to remedy an earth beyond divine control, and who did not grant Christ resurrection in posthumous vindication of some prehumous abandonment.

   • 1978, Malcolm P. Douglass, editor, Forty-Second Yearbook, The Claremont Reading Conference, page 226:

     It was deemed vital to one’s posthumous career to be as certain as possible that no unwarranted black marks appeared on the Heavenly record of prehumous deeds.

   • 1981, Warman Welliver, transl., Dante in Hell: The De Vulgari Eloquentia, Ravenna: A. Longo Editore, translation of original in Renaissance Latin, page 19:

     Does the De Vulgari not mark his term in Hell — in a metaphorical and prehumous Hell, to be sure, but a Hell where his suffering must have been no less painful than that reputedly inflicted in the real and posthumous one?

   • 1984, Planning, page 28, column 3:

     The fact that my profession gives me a prehumous funeral is not important to the main point, and there is nothing that you can do about that because the job is already done.

   • 1984, The Listener, page 27, column 3:

     Thus, according to the French geneticist and sometime Nobel prizewinner, the late Jacques Monod, our prehumous autobiography is written into our genes, and there is nothing we can say or do to modify or change one title of the inexorable unfolding.

   • 1988, Leslie Woolf Hedley, editor, Contemporary American Satire, Exile Press, →ISBN, page 243:

     Just as Article I of our Constitution now bans the granting of titles of nobility by the United States, so this amendment will ban, in such cases, the granting of pride of place in the TV or newspaper headlines to members of our pop, political, and industrial elites, while the rest of us nobodies retain our "prehumous" anonymity as units toted up in a two-digit number.

   • 1991 January 21, David English, “Letters”, in New York, page 8:

     All too often we have to wait until a quiet genius like [Saul] Steinberg dies before we read a tribute to his life and work, and that is a shame. Like Ronald Searle, Al Hirschfeld, and Edward Gorey (to name three of his brethren), he is more than deserving of—to coin a word—prehumous homage.

   • 1993, Klaus G. Roy et al., Not Responsible for Lost Articles: Thoughts and Second Thoughts from Severance Hall, 1958-1988, Cleveland, Oh.: The Musical Arts Association, →ISBN, page 9:

     We have heard of posthumous compositions (published, not written, after the composer’s death), but up to now we have not encountered prehumous compositions.

   • 1997, Bob Ellis, Goodbye Jerusalem: Night Thoughts of a Labor Outsider, Vintage Books, →ISBN, page 29:

     This, I divined, was Bob Carr’s prehumous bedside manner, his own private system of glad tidings when visiting the doomed, or their grieving widows.

   • 1997, Rupert Glasgow, Split Down the Sides: On the Subject of Laughter, Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, →ISBN, page 117:

     The culmination of Trimalchio’s morbid desire for a prehumous taste of posthumous flattery is his staging of a mock-wake: “Pretend I’m dead and say something nice,” he bids his guests, adopting an appropriate position.

   • 1998, Settling New Scores: Music Manuscripts from the Paul Sacher Foundation, →ISBN, page 62:

     Such an approach has its advantages, if not for the historian, then for the author, as we are told by Robert Musil in the introduction to the slender volume of unpublished writings he assembled under the title Nachlass zu Lebzeiten, or roughly, “Prehumous Papers.”

   • 2002, The International Journal of African Studies, page 19:

     No other Black man in history has pulled off such a “prehumous” accomplishment (as distinct from a posthumous elegy).

   • 2005, Steven Elliot Selman, “Foreword”, in Prehumous (As opposed to Posthumous) Unpoetic Poems about Sex, Violence and Secrets they don’t want you to know, iUniverse, →ISBN, page xi:

     I’ll risk it anyway. I’ll publish prehumously. Why not call it: Prehumous Unpoetic Poems?

   • 2007, Joshua Cohen, Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, New York, N.Y.: Fugue State Press, →ISBN, page 30:

     […] my Opus -I, my Opus Prehumous if you want, if you will, Schneidermann he said: […]

   • 2017, James David Audlin, “General Preface”, in The Gospel of John: The Original Version Restored & Translated with Commentaries (The Works of John the Presbyter; book one), volumes one, “The Text and an Early History of the Text”, Editores Volcán Barú, →ISBN, page 9:

     I copied page after page of these works in longhand into my working notebook, Prehumous Writings, and they had a profound effect on me.

   • 2017, Jan Wilm, “The J. M. Coetzee Archive and the Archive in J. M. Coetzee”, in Patrick Hayes, Jan Wilm, editors, Beyond the Ancient Quarrel: Literature, Philosophy, and J. M. Coetzee, Oxford University Press, →ISBN:

     Posthumous papers may come with the connotation of having been abandoned and therefore of being disorderly, involving a lack of control by the writer; they may, then, seem like a ‘more complete’ archive in one way, as the death of the author might preclude any destruction of parts of the papers. Contrary to that, ‘prehumous papers’ (as it were) strike one as involving more care, since the process of donation is a voluntary one, and therefore might give the impression that the author’s consent is evidence of candour.

Synonyms

• antemortem
• anthumous
• predeath
• premortem

Antonyms

• posthumous
• post mortem

Derived terms

• prehumously

References

• “prehumous adj”, in Britannica Book of the Year, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (William Benton), 1973, page 732, column 3