"All The Way From New Orleans To Jerusalem"

Today, I learned what the word "antepenultimate" means--the oen before the one before the last, usually associated with syllable count in words.

Okay, I can understand the word "penultimate," and how it might be a useful word to have once in awhile, especially if you like sounding really smart and impressive (my personal favorite use of the term is in the phrase "the penultimate frontier," mostly because frontiers, by their very definition, can never be the final frontier, because that would imply you know what lies beyond the frontier, which would mean it's not really a frontier...thus, you can never have a "final frontier," only a "penultimate frontier" at best. But I digress). But honestly, when would the term "antepenultimate" be useful? Wouldn't it be easier--for the sake of clarity and ease of communication--to say something like "the one before the next to last?" Besides, there aren't enough words in spoken or even common written English that have enough syllables to warrant the use of the term. Most of the really big multisyllabic words in our language are science words, and they don't go in for fancy humanities terms like "antepenultimate." Honestly, the only time I can see the term "antepenultimate" being even halfway useful is when you're dealing with German, since that language has a tendency to just slap words together to create new ones and you end up with words that're twenty syllables long.

It could be that I've just got too much free time to think about these sorts of things. Then again, since I didn't get anything else accomplished this afternoon, it's good that I'm at least doing something, right?

~chuck

Song of the Moment: David Gray, "December"