| 词组 | penultimate |
| 释义 | penultimate Safire 1984 records the efforts of a correspondent who sent a couple of newspaper clippings in which penultimate was used in the sense of "ultimate, final, last." It may be tempting to some people to use penultimate, which means "next-to-last," in this way. It has a more impressive look and sound than a mere ultimate or final. But it is not always easy to tell if penultimate is being used as an emphatic ultimate. It often requires extra-linguistic knowledge: you have to know if the penultimate whatever-it-is was in fact the last one or not. Or you have to persevere through enough context to find out whether or not the writer knows what is penultimate. Sometimes a writer provides a giveaway, though: • Just as the first of these three novels begins with a missionary teacher ... so the third and penultimate volume... —Nancy Wilson Ross, Saturday Rev., 24 June 1972 You may be a bit suspicious of what a writer had in mind when you find penultimate modifying a plural: • The penultimate days of the event —Benjamin DeMott, American Scholar, Winter 1962-1963 • ... the penultimate decades of the century —Gerald Taylor, Silver, 2d ed., 1963 But most of the time, unless you have knowledge to the contrary, you have to assume writers know the meaning of the word: • ... regulations have cleared the penultimate hurdle and appear ready to become law —John Aloysius Farrell, Sunday Denver Post, 2 Sept. 1984 • ... rises to a rare moment of lyric power in the novel's penultimate paragraph —Joyce Carol Oates, N. Y. Times Book Rev., 3 Oct. 1982 If you remember the meaning of penultimate, it should give you no trouble. |
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