No such thing as “pre-heat”

I don’t know why this has always bugged me so much. It’s a piddly little thing, but one of my biggest linguistic pet peeves is cooking directions that say, “pre-heat oven to 400 then put food in.” There’s no such thing! Heating is an action, you can’t pre-do an action. How is “pre-heating” an oven any different than “heating” an oven? You can’t pre-heat an oven any more than you can pre-sit down or pre-go to the store. It’s an action, if you do the action then it’s done. Pre-heating, if you take it literally is like heating something then letting it cool before you heat it to use it. It’s simple word order: “heat the oven, then put the food in,” like go to the store, then make dinner. You'd never say I'm going to make dinner but first I'm going to pre-go to the store.