At our local farmer's market last Saturday, an enthusiastic young man was bragging to his out-of-town guests about the various vegetable and food stands. "Here's where you buy the best bread in town," I heard him say. "It's the penultimate bakery." "Penultimate?" There's no doubt in my mind that the young feller meant to say that this particular bakery -- a very excellent one, in fact -- was the best of the best. Not just the "ultimate," but more than ultimate. In his mind, "ultimate" means best, and the prefix "pen" signifies "more than" or "extremely." I'd never heard "penultimate" used in such a way, but I googled the word and found a number of such uses, including a Penultimate Wine Bar in St. Louis and a quotation from the speaker of the Massachusetts House of Delegates, who, arguing in support of a proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, specified that "voters must be given the chance to speak. They have the penultimate constitutional authority, not four judges."
Of course, according to every dictionary on the planet, "penultimate" is not a superlative of "ultimate." It means, as it has always meant, "next to last." It's from the common Latin word "paene" -- nearly or almost, and from "ultima" -- last. Penultimate is almost the last in the same way that penumbra is almost a shadow.
One of the reasons that I'm taken aback by this novel use is that for me, penultimate isn't at all an unfamiliar or exotic word. It entered my life in high school Latin, in the early 1950s, and therefore dates back to my earliest adventures in literacy. In Miss Beulah Withee's classes, we spent many hours learning to scan Virgil and Ovid. (I don't really know why we did so; you don't need to master metrics in order to appreciate the poetry. I imagine that the practice dates back many centuries to a time when gentlemen were expected to compose Latin verses.) We students of first-year Latin were taught that the last syllable of a line was the ultima, the next-to-last the penult, and third from last the antepenult. Thanks to Miss Withee, "penultimate" has never posed any mystery for me. But let me hazard a guess that neither the bread enthusiast, nor the owner of the St. Louis watering hole, nor the Massachusetts speaker were ever required to scan Latin hexameters.
Although penultimate in the sense of "the very best" is, so to speak, "wrong," I can feel it gaining fast. It's breathing down my neck. And if it's used often enough in the new signification, "very best" will soon supplant "next to last." Let me predict that in fifty years of so, "penultimate," which even as I write these words yearns to mean "better than best," will be only used in its original Latinate sense by a handful of old fogies who will cling to the antique meaning with all the feeble strength in their ancient bony fingers. I can even imagine a time when the prefix "pen" will become detached from "penultimate" and will be used to create a whole series of imaginative new "
I'm of two minds about such changes. I'm well aware that language is inherently unstable and, intellectually speaking, I'm a descriptivist, not a prescriptivist. I try to be tolerant of new words; in fact, I'm proud of the handful that I've invented myself. don't want to turn into some kind of mossbackosaurus convinced that any innovation in usage signals the demise of western civilization as we've known it. Nevertheless, I can't deny that the phrase "penultimate bakery" grates very harshly on my sensitive ears.
Moreover, I'd feel mighty squishy if I had to suppress my instinctive desire to rail against contemporary linguistic collapse.
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