Yesterday I reached out to my twitter friends and asked for suggestions for words to blog about here. Many responded, and I’ve now got several great ideas, thanks! While all were good words, the next to last one was penultimate. Funny eh? Since that’s what penultimate means…next to last. What a great word. It’s so grand sounding. As though the person who crafted it decided that the next to last of something deserved extra special attention, not being the first or even having the elegance of being last. The person who suggested this word to me, Tom Godell of Lexington, KY tells me there’s a pub in St. Louis called Riddle’s Penultimate Pub. I thought I might check it out next time I visit my folks, but when I visited their website I saw they’re closed until further notice. How sad. Now I’ll never know if the barman there called for “penultimate call!” before “last call”.
Excellent choice! Thanks to you and Tom from Kentucky, I go to sleep a smarter woman tonight.
Mission accomplished! 😉
Crap. I think I’ve used this word incorrectly. I better use dictionary.com AND this blog as reference more often. Thanks for the share!:)
Suz – I sort of love that you said “crap” on a blog about good words. It leads me down a whole other path, to phrases my daughter uses with that as the root. For example, “crap muffins” or “crap sticks”. You get the picture.
I love this word! For a long time, I thought it meant beyond the ultimate. Another reason I should continue to use the dictionary.
I used to think that too! Like, “super ultimate!” Good thing we have each other to learn from. 🙂