What you're about to say is stupid – how to get your 'pretaliation' in first

An MP has accused Sebastian Coe of 'pretaliation' in advance of the damning report into doping in world athletics. We asked a language expert for a 'presponse' to the new word's coming popularity

The thing about retaliation, as everyone knows, is that you should get it in first. And now there's a word for that: the eminently logical "pretaliation". The MP Paul Flynn has been having fun on Twitter by describing Seb Coe's attempts to defend himself in advance against the report on doping in athletics as "(new word) PRETALIATION".

It's not actually a new word. The earliest Google results seem to be for Pretaliation, the noughties heavy metal band, which figures. More recently, the term has arisen in US commercial law to describe onerous employee non-disclosure agreements that seek to circumvent rules against retaliation towards whistleblowers. One might be reminded of the deathly absurdities of military euphemism: the innovation last decade, for instance, of "pre-emptive strike" to denote an attack to defend against something that hasn't happened yet and probably won't.