[rescue] Re: suitspeak/marketspeak

[rescue at sunhelp.org]

Heres my little rant on the pseudo-word proactive.

People use proactive to mean the opposite of reactive, because being
reactive is percieved to be bad. There's a major problem with that.

Reactive is a modification of the verb 'react' meaning 'to respond to an
action' with the suffix -ive, thus creating an adjective meaning 'tending to
be responsive to action'.

proactive is a modification of the adjective active meaning 'tending to act,
or to be in physical motion' with the prefix pro- which means 'acting in
place of'.

So what proactive actually means is 'in place of action' i.e. do nothing

Which is what most people who regularly use the word proactive do.

The word that most appropriately means the opposite of reactive is actually
preemptive,
which means undertaken or initiated to deter or prevent an anticipated,
usually unpleasant situation or occurrence.

Chris Byrne