I heard this a couple of days ago while watching a History Channel program on the Ark of the Covenant.

Problem:
The verb “pre-planned” is a nonsense word.

Explanation:
The “pre” in “pre-planned” is redundant, just as the “back” in “return back” is redundant.

To plan something is to do think about something before it occurs.

The “pre” prefix also means before.

It makes no sense to think about something before before.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following words (with the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

• “planned” — 155,000,000 matches
• “pre-planned” — 1,400,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have avoided this “pre-” redundancy by a ratio of almost 111:1, which is good but not great, especially in light of over one million(!) “pre-planned” matches.

Solution:
“It wasn’t something I planned.”