Make Your Point: PRESAGE

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pronounce PRESAGE:

"PREH sidge."
(It rhymes with "message.")

Or, if you prefer, "pruh SAGE."
(It rhymes with "the stage.")

connect this word to others:

As English speakers, we have so many verbs to pick from for people and things that reveal the future, including predict, sense, intuit, divine, foretell, foresee, foreshadow, har____er ("to signal or indicate that something is about to happen"), and au__r ("to show or suggest that some specific thing, good or bad, will happen, as in the Roman days of old when priests would watch for signs that the crop yield would increase").

And presage, which we'll check out today.

Presage literally means "to perceive (something) before (it happens)." See if you can recall a closely related word: not a synonym, but a word that also traces back to the Latin sagire, meaning "to perceive." It's sag___ous, a word for people who are smart in a quick, practical way.

(To reveal any word with blanks, give it a click.)

definition:

The word "presage" traces back to Latin bits that literally mean "perceive" (sagire) "before" (prae).

Since the 1500s, we've used "presage" in English to mean "to give a warning about what's to come" and "to know ahead of time what's to come."

In other words, to presage some event is to show or reveal that it's going to happen soon.

grammatical bits:

Part of speech:

These days, it's most often a verb, the transitive kind: "His grim face presaged unpleasant news," "The mild weather forecast presaged a crowded beach." Here's the BBC: "Did [the RMS Queen Mary] presage the monster cruise ships of today?"

Other forms:

The other verb forms are "presaged" and "presaging."

In older texts, you'll see "presage" used as a noun, meaning "a sign, an indicator, a suggestion of what's to come," often used countably ("These are the presages of war") but sometimes uncountably ("This is the presage of war"). Here's John Milton: "If there be aught of presage in the mind, this day will be remarkable in my life."

If you need an adjective, you can pick from "presaged," "presaging," "presageful," "presagient," and "presagious," but none are commonly used today.

how to use it:

Pick the semi-common, ultra-formal word "presage" when you want to sound serious as you talk about people inferring the future from the past or present.

Talk about signs, events, announcements, discoveries and so on that presage other things.

For example, you might talk about clouds that presage rain, a fight or ultimatum that presages the end of a relationship, a technological advance that presages a social revolution, or a dream that presages doom.

examples:

"As he looked at her it seemed to him that something in her softened, as though a bitter frost were yielding at the first faint presage of Spring."
— J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King, 1966

"Cars are deeply connected to our understanding of independence, but that may fade when we lose control of their systems. Will ceding control of our vehicles presage a broader loss of autonomy?"
— Jacob Brogan, Slate, 1 June 2016

has this page helped you understand "presage"?

Awesome, I'm glad it helped!

study it:

Explain the meaning of "presage" without saying "foreshadow" or "adumbrate."

try it out:

In the Wall Street Journal, David Wessel noted:

"Fissures in the foundation do not necessarily presage collapse. But they are signs of tensions that, if unaddressed, can weaken an economic edifice, even one as impressive as China's."

With China's economy in mind as an example, talk about something else that may have little cracks in the foundation, so to speak, that don't "necessarily presage collapse." Your example might be another economy, or a trend, a relationship, a company, an industry, or a political or healthcare system.

before you review, play:

Try to spend 20 seconds or more on the game below. Don’t skip straight to the review—first, let your working memory empty out.

Our game this month is Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Fragments.

In each issue, check out an excerpt from a master of American prose, one in which I've changed the lovely sentence fragments into ugly but grammatically correct sentences. Try restoring the excerpt to its original glory by chiseling those sentences down into fragments.

You can check out some examples here.

Try this one today. It's from Henry David Thoreau's Walden:

Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Choose simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds.

To see the original version, scroll all the way down.

review this word:

1. The opposite of a PRESAGE could be

A. PRESTIGE: a reputation for being fantastic.
B. an EXIGENCY: a situation that demands urgent action.
C. a VESTIGE: a little leftover piece of something, like a footprint on a track.

2. Dana Stevens described the first hour of a movie as "[threatening] to presage one of those lifestyle memoirs about middle-aged Americans finding themselves in Tuscany," meaning the movie seemed like it would _____ one of those cheesy memoirs.

A. parody
B. dismantle
C. soon turn into

a final word:

I hope you're enjoying Make Your Point. It's made with love.

I'm Liesl Johnson, a reading and writing tutor on a mission to explore, illuminate, and celebrate words.

From my blog:
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A disclaimer: When I write definitions, I use plain language and stick to the words' common, useful applications. If you're interested in authoritative and multiple definitions of words, I encourage you to check a dictionary. Also, because I'm American, I stick to American English when I share words' meanings, usage, and pronunciations; these elements sometimes vary across world Englishes.

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