This forepast evening, as rain was not forecast, we determined to take a boat to the island with a submarine for repast. But just past four, when I had bought the sandwich, the sky became overcast and the clouds started to pour fast, forestopping our plans. What to do? It was too late to make pasta for supper. Fortunately, within a half hour the downpour had passed over and we met our prefixed plan – we were on the ferry and cast off superfast, and no sooner had we reached the beach than the submarine was within us. And so the forecast was forepast and the repast was forepast, and all was fair sport.
You probably don’t use the word forepast – frankly, I don’t know who does – but it’s in the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster, both of them having it as an alternative spelling of forepassed, and neither of them calls it obsolete (though Wiktionary does). But it’s only current, it seems, as an adjective; you can’t use it adverbially (“what I had done forepast”) – not anymore, anyway – and there’s no established use of it as a noun at all: you can’t, alas, speak of “the forepast.”
Which, I suppose, is to be expected; we already have the past, and what need is an extra syllable before it? What, the past before the past? But forepast doesn’t mean that; it just means ‘that has passed before’ – a synonym is bygone, and while we can “let bygones be bygones,” we can’t “let gones be gones,” whereas we can “let the past be the past” and so have no need for the aforementioned fore. And, for that matter, Oxford says that forepast is now used “only of time”; you can speak of forepast days and forepast hours and the forepast evening.
But you know what? Who even knows that? This word has been with us since the 1500s, if not longer, and it’s in Shakespeare and Spenser, but, though its sense and construction are perspicuous, good luck finding current uses of it except in books quoting or emulating works from a forepast time. So you might as well take it as a lexical snack – use it as no more than hors d’œuvres, and not for repast per se, and you can plate it as you will. Or, you know, eat it off paper wrapping on the beach.
Sesquiotica 