WEST CHESTER, PA—Postcards from the Pug Bus, southeastern Pennsylvania’s least influential web site, today launched its National Penultimate Day campaign by sending a Bewerbungsschreiben to the National Day Calendar requesting that December 30 each year be designated National Penultimate Day. Phil Maggitti, Pug Bus editor in briefs, who sometimes writes under the pen name The Grammar Prick, released the contents of that letter from his cramped but inconvenient suite in West Chester, Pennsylvania.
“I am writing on behalf of Postcards from the Pug Bus to respectfully submit that you designate December 30 each year as National Penultimate Day. The organization’s request is based on two observations: the first is the growing misuse of “penultimate” to mean “the greatest” when it really means “the next to last.” Designating December 30 each year as National Penultimate Day would go a long way toward preserving, protecting, and defending the original and logical use of ‘penultimate.’
“The second reason for designating December 30 as National Penultimate Day is its redheaded-stepchild status among days. Sure, everybody makes a fuss over December 31–parties, crazy hats, New Year’s resolutions and such–but who spares a thought for the penultimate day of the year, December 30? With the approval of the good people at National Day Calendar, we can rectify that situation. Thank you, Phil Maggitti, Editor, Postcards from the Pug Bus”
Now if you came here looking for a teachable moment only to stumble into a crusade instead, I got your teachable moment, Skippy.
It begins with an attack on a festering boil of a problem—the misuse of penultimate where ultimate is not only necessary but also sufficient. Penultimate, as civilized people learn in school, means “last but one in a series of things; the next to last.” Penultimate does not mean nor should it be allowed to mean “the most ultimate” or “the most awesome” ever.
The misuse of penultimate leads to atrocities like the following headline from Science Direct, “Female genital mutilation: the penultimate gender abuse.” Or this cheese ball from the Parksville-Qualicum News in British Columbia: “The penultimate insult to my dad’s world view was the portrayal of fathers on television.” Or this pitch from a public relations professional: “The NRA provides the penultimate value-added services for discerning gun owners.”
The incorrect use of penultimate to mean “the absolute, fucking, balls-to-the-wall greatest of all times, ever” is a malapropism, a slip of the tongue wherein speakers puff out their chests and substitute a grand-sounding word for a plainer-sounding one because of a similarity in pronunciation (or because the grand word sounds cool and rolls off the tongue organically like water off a duck’s ass feathers).
Instead, here’s how penultimate was meant to be used: “During the training, they dived on the wreck five times, successfully identifying the truck on the penultimate dive.” So what was the dive on which they identified the truck? Yep, the fourth one, the one before the last.
Here’s one more: “The Giants didn’t clinch a wild card berth until the penultimate day of the season.”
That, boy’s and girls, is why we need a National Penultimate Day.
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