usage/definition of "Prior to"

Those are abstract conceptions. You should get a lady's permission prior to trying to get her brassiere hooks undone.

And a nod's as good as a wink to a blind horse.

"Prior to" has several meanings. It can mean a temporal "before" and it can mean a prior step in thinking about a topic (logically prior).

"Prior to" has several meanings. It can mean a temporal "before" and it can mean a prior step in thinking about a topic (logically prior).

robber / mugged / man
(when?) prior to / killing/ him.
(means "before')


the following are predicates meaning "position"
theory / is \prior

Demands / are \ prior
to / politics."

I may be wrong, but I consider the grammar of these two sentences to be crap.

And they are illogical too.

Open the window, get the book where you saw them, and throw it out as hard as you can.

Will you explain Mac? 4 things. Why each is crap grammar and why they are illogical.

And books should never be thrown out of windows.

I prepared a thoughtful parsing of these, but went back to check a fact, and I lost my text.

However suffice to say that "prior to" means "before". There's no need to make it more complicated than that. And if you substitute "before" in these sentences, you get a syntactical smorgasbord.
It's jargon, in my humble opinion.
Good ideas can be very plainly put. If it sounds overcomplicated or obscure, the fault is generally not with the reader, it's because the author doesn't know what he's talking about.

But "prior to" does have shades of irony in some contexts. I still don't see how you arrive at your four separate conclusions. I think it's a style choice. I have no objections. I think I know what the author meant.

How would you phrase them to mean the same?