“It’s the penultimate experience.”
Wow. So that’s, like, the pinnacle of the ultimate, right?
Sure seems like it to many people penning pieces about all-time bests. And, you know, I can understand the impression driving it: longer means more important. When I was a kid, I knew about Disneyland, and I knew about Walt Disney World, and I thought, OK, Disney is great, so Walt Disney is an even greater degree of Disney. Like bishop and archbishop. Like fabulous and fantabulous and, hmm, fanfreakingtabulous. And, at length, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Which is the absolute penultimate. Right?
Except of course not. Ultimate and penultimate are like centre and epicentre. Some people use epicentre as though it means ‘centre, but epic’, but it really means ‘the point on the surface of the earth directly above the centre of an earthquake or underground explosion’. So not exactly at the centre. Certainly not at the centre of the centre.
And penultimate? Well, we know ultimate, of course: it means ‘the last, the farthest’; it comes from Latin ultimus, the superlative of ulter, which means ‘beyond’ – the feminine form is ultra, which you will be familiar with. We moderate it with pen, as in penumbra ‘the half-shadow area around the central shadow, or umbra’, and peninsula, ‘a body of land that is almost but not quite an island’. It’s from paene, ‘almost’. So penultimate is not the ultimate of the ultimate. It’s just the almost ultimate. Like the vice-ultimate.
And anyway, if penultimate is the highest degree of ultimate, the mother of all ultimates, then what about antepenultiumate? That would be, uh, the auntie of the mother of all ultimates? An eighth note – a short musical note – is a quaver, and you can get down to a sixty-fourth note with hemidemisemiquaver, which is infreakingcredibly minuscule. But antepenultimate just means ‘before almost last’, i.e., third-last – like the syllable stress in the word antepenultimate (and, for that matter, in the word ultimate).
And syllable stress is where you’re most likely to see antepenultimate and, apart from overenthusiastic misusages, penultimate. But in phonology and prosody, they like to use a shorter form to name the second-last syllable: the penult… which, by the way, has two ways to say it: with the stress on the ultimate syllable or on the penult. But either way, it’s just not as prepossessing a word, is it? “This experience is the penult.” Sounds more like a penalty. And it’s kinda short. Just doesn’t make it all the way there.
Sesquiotica 