this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024
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It may have been the ultimate list 4 years ago, but I haven't updated it in so long I would've been embarrassed to call it the ultimate now :p
Well, if you only plan to do one more, this could actually be the penultimate list. But if this is the last one, then the previous one would have been penultimate.
Mind you, I'm 100% okay with using penultimate to mean second best, instead of the actual definition as next to last. It makes sense as a non standard/slang usage, since the last is often the best (depending on the list, of course, but most save the best for last). It's a good play on the way we use ultimate as both final/last as well as best.
One of these days, the dictionaries will catch up to this usage and it'll become a standard usage, so you're getting in on the penultimate use of penultimate as slang, in a way :)
That was my intended use of the word, but I'm not ashamed to admit that I fully misread the little info blurb in my search engine, which led me to believe I was using it appropriately 😅
I thought it said: a formal or literary way of saying it is not a superlative or beyond ultimate, as many people think.
...I didn't notice the period after 'it' (or the double 'it'). But the sentence right after that one is really the pièce de résistance! 🤌
But I very much appreciate your charitable view on my fumble.
Well hell, that's just as cool as using a word in a fun way. You looked it up and just got steered wrong by difficult typesetting. My dyslexic ass would have gotten the same impression as you if I had to scan that on my own and come out with a definition.
I like where you went with your take. We collectively could probably stand to be more flexible like that
I feel that :)
A living language is going to shift. It's inevitable. It's necessary to hold a formal version of a language for important things for sure, but for every day conversation, pedantry is just silly. Not only can we never expect everyone to know every word and every usage of every word, mistakes happen. It's a very human thing to pick up a word and never run across a formal definition for it, and that's okay.
It's easy enough to offer a formal definition if there's a misunderstanding, to get everyone on the same wavelength. But if everyone gets the intended gist, why get all het up? Communication should be fun and engaging, not a battle over semantics and usage.