An open letter to ABC Pronounce

I write to draw attention to the pernicious creep of “preventative” instead of “preventive” in what the ABC broadcasts. Your pronunciation standards guide, ABC Pronounce, formally notes that “preventive”, not preventative be used. This ruling has been in place since 1989.

Tonight on the Sydney 7pm news bulletin, the words “preventative medicine” bannered an item on vaping. I’ve noticed it several times recently.

Scopus, the scientific world’s largest and most respected scholarly reference service indexes  over 22,000 journals. Not one of these has the word “preventative” in its title, but there are 10 with “preventive” (see https://www.scopus.com/sources.uri)

The School of Public Health at the University of Sydney was the first school of public health in Australia and the first to offer a Masters in Public Health (in 1978). At the time it had a Department of Preventive and Social Medicine.  I was on the staff from the first intake of students and today have an emeritus appointment in the School.

Across 45 years, there have been countless times when staff in the School have rolled their eyes and corrected students’ essays and treatises by changing “preventative” to “preventive”.  “Preventative” is an infectious Americanism which has attained its currency by brute force of repetition. It grates in the ears of anyone working in this field . I’d put it in the same league as the American pronunciation of “defence” (“dee-fence”). I’ve never heard an American official refer to the US Department of Dee-Fence, yet the dee-word is endemic in sports commentators.

Sorry, but anyone who pairs “preventative” with “medicine” immediately marks themselves as someone who has never actually worked in preventive medicine.

The knock-out argument here is this: there is no verb to “preventate”. We simply prevent things and in public health, preventive medicine is a major division in the discipline of public health.

Please weed it out ABC.