Penultimate

Single syllable.
All Dooley's brain can handle.
That dumb, readers not.

 

Some big words are fine.
Penultimate? Merely
Big for sake of big.

(Yeah, bad break).

 

Bad break, yes indeed.
Also bad count on line two.
Premise sucks, as well.

 

I see what you say,
But is penultimate worth
This much a hissy?

 

Word not the issue:
Your attitude agitates.
A microcosm.

 

Craven poppycock
That I eschew verbiage.
--Herman T. Zweibel.

 

Ah, Khartoum, fellow promoter of Seymour Asses' fate, I fear you miss the point. It's not so much that the word itself is unknown, though if I had to wager I'd say a large portion of our readership won't correctly define it. It's that it's used superflously; writers drop it in because it makes them look smart, without any sense of flow or propiety. No word, in and of itself, is going to improve a story; it has to fit a design. If not, then the only people you're going to impress are thesaurus worshippers -- people who don't know it will stop or flow on by, scratching their heads, and the ones that DO know it are going to wonder "well, what was the point of using that word in that context?"

We are not going to attract the literati by carpet-bombing our stories with mega-point Scrabble words. We're going to get them with good writing, and good reporting. And you know something else? Joe Lunchpail and Jane Truck Driver are going to be on board with that, too. It's not our job to provide grammar or literature lessons; if we're to be teachers, it's to teach our readers what happened, why it happened and how that affects what's going to happen.

This is not, as one poster described, a choice between the upper 10 percent and the others. In this day and age, we can't afford to go tunnel-vision on any 10 percent. There's no reason why we have to choose, and the good writers understand the balance and walk the line as best they can. Are the Mensa members among our circulation going to revolt because of the lack of penultimate, or celerity, or pyrrhic victory in a story on the Redskins-Eagles game or a spending bill going through revisions in a Senate sub-committee? I'd imagine no. Clear and consice reporting and well-written stories transend class, culture and education.

Now back to the word of the day. Penultimate, in the right neighborhood, is a fine turn of phrase. But most of the times I've seen it recently, it sticks out like a peacock in a flock of doves at a graveside funeral -- obviously notable, obviously inappropriate. There are precious few times where penultimate trumps next-to-last, or a rewrite to avoid using the term and its synonyms entirely.

In essence, this is a more elegant dressing of a problem a lot of young (and, I've come to discover, older) writers have with finding new ways to express the concept of "said". Reckoned, recalled, stated, related, rejoined, ejaculated (seriously, that one showed up in a story a stringer did for me a few years ago). Using "said" doesn't dumb down a story to My Pet Goat levels, and avoiding penultimate for the sake of penultimate doesn't either.

And to be blunt, making this out to be a case of intellectual haves vs. have nots is only a couple of steps removed from the most revelled of manhood-waving contests in Intraweb discourse: IQ comparisons.

Oh, and Khartoum: 'tis not our job to appeal to OR to raise the lowest common denominator. Ours is to report the news, fairly, cleanly and accurately. Raising the LCD is a task for the teachers and the advocates. What we're here to do is report on what they do. If anyone wants to change the world, they should join the Peace Corps or find whatever outlet they need to rage against the machine. Not our calling -- at least not while we're on the clock.

Finally, I see
That I have interrupted
A haiku-jack. Whoops.

EDIT: And I unintentionally proved my point by misspelling pyrrhic victory. Got the pyrrhic right, messed up on the other word.

 

Stall a haiku-jack?
A path of perniciousness
Fraught with fraud and fail

 

Amused, astounded.
Khartoum returns to bitch-slap
But Dools won't go down.

 

That's not how I roll.
Anything wrong with that? No.
Just needs to be said.

 

That haiku sounded
like it was written by boots
perish the bad thought

 

Keep it in PMs.
You need to remain on topic.
Have a nice (blank) day.