{"id":381,"date":"2018-04-19T11:47:38","date_gmt":"2018-04-19T15:47:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/?p=381"},"modified":"2018-04-26T10:48:16","modified_gmt":"2018-04-26T14:48:16","slug":"word-of-the-week-penultimate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/2018\/04\/19\/word-of-the-week-penultimate\/","title":{"rendered":"Word of the Week! Penultimate"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>This post will run the final week of classes, but it is really the penultimate week for academic work here: do not forget your final exam week, students!<\/p>\n

The word itself has a decidedly academic “look” to it, but I find it used as often in journals of ideas such as The Atlantic Monthly<\/a><\/em>. I brought doughnuts to class today, our next-to-last writing workshop of the semester. For that penultimate class, however, I would never ask\u00a0 “who ate the penultimate doughnut”?<\/p>\n

The OED Online<\/a>, online or in print, gives our word first as a noun, a form I rarely see in formal usage today. The adjectival form appears far more often, though I had never before encountered the now rare mathematical use meaning “Relating to or designating a member of a family of curves that is arbitrarily close to a degenerate form.”<\/p>\n

A Merriam-Webster post<\/a> points out a usage error for this term. Never use it in formal writing to mean “last.” Bryan Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage<\/em> seconds that opinion. The word gets employed to mean “the best of the best” but that usage is also incorrect. Our word always means “next to last.”\u00a0 I could see it being acceptable in casual usage as “the best for now, until something better arrives to replace it.”<\/p>\n

The final word remains out on penultimate; in a century, it may mean exactly “the best, so far,” until a better word shows up.<\/p>\n

Nominate a word by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.<\/p>\n

See all of our Words of the Week here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Image courtesy of Wikipedia<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post will run the final week of classes, but it is really the penultimate week for academic work here: do not forget your final exam week, students! The word itself has a decidedly academic “look” to it, but I find it used as often in journals of ideas such as The Atlantic Monthly. I … Continue reading Word of the Week! Penultimate<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":589,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2516,1172,2521,2520,40197],"tags":[2522],"class_list":["post-381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-writing","category-language","category-style","category-usage","category-vocabulary","tag-word-of-the-week"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pcsCNV-69","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/589"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}