In all seriousness you can pose this question to a theoritical physicist - "Ask Sam Harris anything" is a good place. He is not a physicist but surely he can get the acceptable answer from other leading scientists for us.
I believe it is purely a need to communicate ideas to general public and the general scientific "journalism" around it, so not much effort has been put in proper articulation of the statements.
It means, the Universe as we know it with space-"time" & gravity etc. did not exist, I would think. I saw in Discovery Science not all physicist like this, but we should let maths and actual evidence to sort that out. So in physics, apparently whether time can exist independently [infinite time] or is exist only in the space time and thus has beginning [like in big bang or this new theory] is still an open question.Does the above mean that 14 billion years prior to today, the universe did not exist?
But what you have been pointing out is merely a difficulty with natural the language while articulating "beginning" of time. It could be just be a problem of self-reference as we are talking about time of time.
I thought we can use a meta-time concept to deal with it, but now I realized this problem may go away if one takes time as a measurement from the present. There is no absolute need to measure beginning of the universe/time @ the beginning of the universe, is there? Take your reference frame from now, the present, then even the English language can admit a finite time with its beginning or an infinite time, whatever suits. No? Lets just talk about "past in the present", why talk "past in past in present" and forcing a self reference?
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