0

The following sentense is the title of a news article.

NASA's Mars Helicopter makes last spin on Earth before before July launch

What is the difference between 'before before' and 'before'? Does 'before before' mean 'much before'?

Improve this question
2
  • 3
    It's a typo / mistake.
    – stevekeiretsu
    Commented Mar 31, 2020 at 8:02
  • 3
    Yep. Just an error. It should be "before the July launch"; looks like the sentence got rewritten a couple times without careful proofreading.
    – the-baby-is-you
    Commented Mar 31, 2020 at 8:08

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
1

It is a mistake. Could have happened from any number of variations of copy-and-paste gone wrong, or possibly even just from the author being interrupted in the middle of writing that sentence. Unfortunately, this sort of thing is all too common these days - the art of proofreading seems to have died in the rush to get news published - so a Google search will probably pick up similar mistakes from any online newspaper.

"Normal" English very, very rarely has repeated words like that, (other than for emphasis like I did just there,) and I cannot think of any example where before could legitimately be doubled up like that.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .