Fixin’ to…

This is about to get proleptic.

I had to do a double take when Michael Bird used the word “proleptically” in a sentence over there at his blog. Naturally, I looked up the definition(since I only proleptically already knew it). Now, I’m pretty sure that he was using the word in the sense of definition #2 there. But it was definitinon #3 that put me in stitches:

the use of a descriptive word in anticipation of its becoming applicable.

“There’s fixin’ to be a butt whippin’,” Tom Swifty is about to say proleptically.