The ultimate blog post about the word penultimate.
Pretty sure I won't have more to say about it after this.
It started with a simple statement, which later permuted itself into raging brain activity as I tried to get to sleep.
Why would such a great word be used for such a stupid thing? Who cares about the next-to-last? I thought as I tossed and turned in bed. Why would we measure such a thing with its own word, and such a great word, instead of just saying next-to-last?
Considering the state of the world today, and the fact that even on erudite Substack, the debate about the halftime show of a football game (open border bump-and-grind vs. Kid-Rock-to-Ritchie) is still limping along, there were worse things to be kept up at night about.
Yes, yes, we have the Latin origin of “almost last” (paene ultimus), but we have some difficulty grasping that ultimus means last, final, and farthest rather than the peak or the greatest, since in English, the meaning has shifted to being a statement of quality instead of position in a sequence.
There is also the word antepenultimate, meaning “third from the end.” There is no danger of that word being used wrongly, or even being used in daily language, because it’s practically a haiku unto itself in syllable count.
It’s interesting that in English, particularly American English, location in position is somehow conflated with whether it is good or not. It’s also interesting that God tells us that the last shall be first and the first shall be last (Matthew 20:16) and blows everything out of the water, but we’ll save that conversation ultimately for another day. It seems our language is most concerned with determining the ultimate ultimate—all of us trying to answer Muhammad Ali’s claim of being the greatest, perhaps—and since penultimate somehow sounds as if we’re saying it’s the super mega ultra supreme hyper absolute downright greatest thing ever, we’re walking around handing out silver medals thinking they’re gold.1
The ultimate, the climactic moment, should get all the good words.
Let’s not forget that two weeks—fourteen days—has been given its own ancient, mossy manse of a word: fortnight.2 Literally, “fourteen nights.”
A cursory bit of research points to heavy usage in Old and Middle English—penultimate English?— but still boggles my mind. Why two weeks? What is so special about half a month? Fourteen days?
I tried to come up with as many two-week measured options as I could: wages, staff rosters, rotating night shifts, government benefit disbursement, and some agricultural activities.3 I suppose you could make a list, but it feels arbitrary. The main takeaway is that sometimes weekly is too soon and monthly too delayed, and two weeks is our happy medium, so we give it a name worthy of a Shakespearean sonnet.
I need a final word on this. For today, it’s just penultimate.
Theory I’ve heard: The silver medalist is the least happy on the podium. The bronze is happy to have placed; the gold is pleased to have won; the silver is just standing there in a solid C-average existence, next to last (and, in this case, also next to first), as mere sandwich filling.
The word sennight (used by Jane Austen, for example) means seven days, or a week, from the Old English seofon nihta, meaning “seven nights.” We like to measure things in the dark, it seems, and not the light of day.
Two weeks as a financial measuring device has a long tradition, and many of the other two-week activities seem to have lined up just to match the payday tradition. But payday and wages, once in those two-week blocks, have been replaced with fintech mobile apps that feel like getting paid whenever you like, but really serve more like payday loans. Money and credit are instant; we can’t wait a fortnight.