prelude

Before a violin soared into a concert hall, someone had to test the strings, the room, the mood — a little musical warm-up that the French called a prélude. The Latin behind it, praeludere, is delightfully literal: 'play beforehand.' That makes prelude a cousin not only of interlude, but of ludicrous too, since both descend from the same Latin ludere, the verb for play; one became serious art, the other a word for absurdity. The prefix pre- does the obvious job, but the surprise is how often 'play' sits at the start of things that later become grand and formal. By the 1560s English had already borrowed the word, and tomorrow you can remember it as the thing that plays before the play.