status quo ante love

status quo ante

Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The way things were before.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From the Latin stātus quō ante bellum erat ("the way things were before the war")

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Examples

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Comments

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  • Today I encountered a dilemma with this: some Swede with good English had written about the 'status quo ante the credit crunch', or some such, trying to use the Latin preposition ante with an English complement. But my intuition was that the English expression 'status quo ante' doesn't work as if it contains a preposition: we say only 'restore the status quo ante', etc. A bit of Web searching confirmed that if we want to say what it was before, we have to be explicit in English: in the end I changed it to 'the status quo ante before the credit crunch'.

    February 24, 2009

  • Interesting dilemma. I've never actually seen the ante tagging along with status quo. Wouldn't it mean the same thing if it stated, "the status quo before the credit crunch"?

    Maybe I'm missing some additional connotation conveyed by ante.

    February 24, 2009

  • The ante before bit has a repetitively tautological sound to it :-7

    February 24, 2009

  • In Italian, we use either status quo or status quo antea, ending in "a"...

    February 25, 2009

  • I thought about 'status quo before the credit crunch', but that rather implies a contrast with the current status quo, which is another tautology. 'Previous status quo' sort of makes sense, and has a few ghits, so 'status quo' doesn't perhaps absolutely imply the present situation.

    February 25, 2009

  • I'm kind of lost now, and I haven't seen the rest of the text so my opinion counts for naught. The alternative, though, did not, for me, imply the comparison with the current status quo. The ante AND "before" still sound redundant to me. But what do I know of tautology? I'm a bear.

    February 25, 2009