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Malaproperistic
Penultimate does not mean what you think it does. If you think it means top of the heap you got another think coming. If someone told you it means top of the heap that person was at best making a common mistake and at worst telling you a bold-faced or bald-faced lie. You can’t slink around life with bad information. You run the risk of waking up one morning and having your life tossed asunder by one vocabulary word. Committee, referring, occurring, recommend, are words that no word processor will let you misspell so you can skate by comfortably ignorant as a bad speller. But what if someone said you were the penultimate member of a group and for twenty years you had thought they meant you were the best when in fact, whether they meant it or not, what they were saying is that you are, as pertains to your grouping, next to last. Next to last? Is that using a horizontal scale of measuring where next to last would be located almost to the far right and be by implication a better thing than next to last on a vertical scale which would implicate you near the bottom? What kind of word is so careless about its meaning and what are you going to do about this? If you were the suspicious type you might start with any number of bone-headed assumptions and move on from there. For example, perhaps twenty years ago penultimate meant best of best but shortly after that the word was co-opted by a radical group consisting of linguists, librarians and dictionarians, who in numerous acts of cunning malfeasance drugged everyone in America while they went about changing the typeset or digital equivalent of all dictionary publishers in the world while at the same time they gathered up and threw out all volumes of written material which would show the word to be in any way complimentary to me. Is that too farfetched? How many misunderstood words would a person have to have under their belt to be totally wrong about everything?