Seizing the opportunity to take preemptive retaliation for something you know will happen.

Messing around with friends often escalates with some crescendo event that signals the end to the fun. To pretaliate is to abruptly advance the inevitable ensuring that you are never the target. Pretaliatory action must ensure that nobody wants to continue playing.
As Ken and Jim where trading stink bombs while watching the game, Larry quietly decided he would pretaliate by taking a dump in the nacho dip.
by Raphael Ricardo January 18, 2008
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Getting your revenge in first.
Do unto him before he can do unto you, if you like.
A guy looks at you nastily across a rugby scrum; next maul, you tear his ear off, before he does the same, or worse, to you. You have completed pretaliation. Anything he does after that is retaliation, which referees always come down on harder than on the original malefactor.
"Did you see Tonto get his pretaliation in on that mean-looking winger?"
"Yeah, he'll be counting his ribs for a month! What a kick! Bet Tonto keeps out of his way for the rest of the game, though!"
by railtracksurvivor October 17, 2007
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