Penultimate

Absolutes are never a good idea, dools.

 

And my crush on IJAG grows mythical in proportion.

 

And that dovetails into a point I made earlier about people using high-dollar terms incorrectly. The times I've seen gravitas used in all but the best stories/editorials, it's just one more synonym of "balls". As in: Joey Paulson showed gravitas by running a quarterback sneak on 4th-and-5 in the second quarter.

Used that way, it certainly makes this quote ...

... more interesting.

 

Dare I say it, Meat, but it might be ironic.

 

Including that one.

And is antepenultimate the next-to-last war before the Civil War?

Ironic? Hoops needs to come and make a ruling.

 

To be fair, most high school football gamers smell like balls anyway, so the effect is lost.

 

Well, they surely don't smell like scotch and rich, polished wood, that's for sure.

 

Nay, the next-to-next-to-last

 

Sirs, Madames,

Okay, did a check. Since the fall of 1997, over what is surely up and around 1.5-million to 2-million words (over seven years of of newspapering, rest in magazines and four books) I've used penultimate twice and not since 2001. Odd though: The dreaded word made it into my copy three times in a six-month stretch prior to that. A deadline habit? A matter for investigation. I remember my creative-writing instructor at Carleton saying it was one of his favorite words.

YHS, etc

 

Is the world of journalism just trying to piss me off?

 

It's threads like this that make me hate this business sometimes. Here you have a veteran journalist, respected on this board and therefore probably respected in his newsroom, staunchly defending the dumbing down of a story. And many are jumping to his side.

It's penultimate, for chrissake. Not some esoteric word pulled from deep out of the recesses of the dictionary. If a reader doesn't know what penultimate means, the hell with him. And you know what? Every now and then it's OK to pull a word deep out of the recesses of the dictionary. I'm so sick of this write-to-a-first-grade-level bullshit. That's what the business is doing now, and look how well it's doing. Maybe it's time we stop dumbing it down and start smarting it up. Maybe we should -- gasp! -- challenge a reader every now and then. God forbid.

Like the Jed Bartlett tagline quote says, "It's not our job to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It's our job to raise it."

Have a little self-respect. Have a little respect for the readers. Trust me, the monosyllabic slack-jawed sect isn't buying the goddamned paper, no matter how much you try to cater it to them. Let them have talk radio. I'll take the literate sect. They're the ones the high-end advertisers want, anyway.

Jesus. Penultimate! PENULTIMATE! You've got to be fucking kidding me, Dools.

 

Worst. Haiku. Ever.