A preliminary is everything that precedes something in time and serves as a preparation or introduction. This word is made up of the prefix pre, which indicates priority, as well as the term liminaris, which means the beginning of something.
The preliminary of something expresses a previous and preparatory action of another. Sometimes this word is used in the plural and talks about the preliminaries, that is, the set of guidelines or actions prior to another.
While the preliminaries are an announcement that something is going to happen next, they usually play a secondary role and are not as relevant as the main action or event.
Examples from everyday life
Before starting a soccer game, the players must perform a whole series of preliminaries: listen to the instructions of the coach in the locker room, warm up the body to prepare the body or perform some kind of pre-match ritual.
In sexual relations, human beings do not have intercourse directly, but there is an approach between the members of the couple in the form of kisses and caresses, that is, the preliminaries that announce the sexual act.
If someone has to give a conference to a group of people, before the conference there are usually some preliminary words, for example, a greeting to the attendees or a few words of thanks as a courtesy formula.
In everyday communication, preliminaries are used to facilitate the exchange of ideas. Thus, the greetings prior to a meeting and the different rules of courtesy act as introductory elements.
The examples indicated above allow us to observe that the preliminaries are a secondary part with respect to the primordial question, but they are not without their importance. In fact, certain performances are unthinkable without the corresponding preliminaries.
When the preliminaries become protagonists
On some occasions, the preliminaries stop being accessories and mere complements and acquire a certain role. Thus, a movie trailer can determine its commercial success or failure, a novel by a new author accompanied by a prologue by a prestigious writer can be a sales success, and a presentation of a new product also determines the sales that go away. To make.
The examples of the trailer, the prologue and the new product serve to remind us that the preliminaries are not always secondary.
Photos: iStock – 2009 Getty Images / franckreporter
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