Penultimate

Sorry, I don't have any vacancy for the position of vice president/what Dooley needs to get over. You're not hired.

 

Damn, the job market is tough all over.

 

It's the hiring freeze; damn BLOGS!

 

Gregg Bell of the AP, have you been reading this thread?

From today's OSU-UW gamer:

Washington took a 7-3 on the penultimate play of the first half when Anthony Russo made a twisting catch at the goal line of a 23-yard pass. The 74,927 in Husky Stadium -- the third-largest crowd in the 87-year-old stadium's history -- rocked as it hadn't in four years.

 

Even if you for some reason think penultimate can be used, it doesn't belong in the same graph as "rocked as it hadn't in four years."

 

Is this really better than:

 

Sirs, Madames,

Four years of Latin out the window. I wrote something about "Paul Coffey's celerity being inexplicable" and a guy on the rim changed it to "celebrity." Which made no sense.

YHS, etc

 

Common ground, Dools. I would have cut that line out with extreme prejudice. AP stories that have stuff like that in them suck on a pair of levels.

A) It comes off as homerish from a service that should always write straight down the middle. I'm sure he was trying to capture the atmosphere, but he whiffed.

B) The AP just shouldn't be "cool" with gamers. Reading that in an AP gamer would be like hearing my dad describe SSgt. Barry Sadler as being "off the chain" when he saw Sadler "drop" Ballad Of The Green Berets on Ed Sullivan in 1967 or something. Totally incongruent.

 

I'm just shocked that we think so few people know what penultimate means. I mean, I think I've know that since middle school.

 

I'm not saying it's not known (tho I'm sure many don't know it). It sure in the hell isn't a word of common usage, and it probably has almost zero usage outside of faux smart blips in newspaper stories and in the occasional vocabulary test.

 

dooley, you have the penultimate post on this thread. Congratulations.

 

Now it's the antepenultimate.