That word doesn't mean what you think it means.

I just got all snide with someone on another site who referred to The Handmaids Tale as "Margaret Atwood's penultimate novel".

Not with eight written since and Atwood still alive and writing!

What did they think it meant?

Maybe she wrote it with the latest thing in pens ... ?

'Big Word Syndrome', I suspect, if I might be excoriating - or is that coruscating?

> 2

In context, the poster clearly meant "her best novel".

>4 lilithcat:
Seems a strange way to say that. I haven't seen the comment in context but I took it to mean it was the next to the last novel of Atwood that the poster had read. And as a personal afterthought I really didn't much like Maddaddam .

> 5

No, the specific comment was "The penultimate Atwood novel is “The Handmaids Tale.” It might be slightly dated, but it is an interesting exploration of women treated as commodity . . ."

I might have thought the intent was to point it out as the second best or second most important.

Robert

When people say things like "The --- Atwood novel is...", the long word they go for is often "quintessential". Maybe the writer thought that penultimate is to ultimate as quintessential is to essential - another manifestation of the "epicentre" phenomenon. Never mind what the prefix means, an epicentre is clearly more central than a mere centre, a quintessence is more essential than a mere essence, and the penultimate is oh so much more ultimate than whatever comes last...

Beautifully thought out, thorold. What might happen if the person who used penultimate in lilithcat's example happened upon 'antepenult' in their reading? Now I'm just being silly.

thorold's explanation was what I was thinking too, partly because before I looked it up, I thought that penultimate meant some other form of ultimate as well. non-native speaker here.

Oh dear, now I'm fretting about the meaning of "quintessential" and trying to resist looking it up, because I don't have time to get pulled into an etymology hole.

If you do get pulled into the etymology hole (I was merely wandering around the brink of it last night...) you realise that "quintessential" is one of those words we pedants would have to condemn with bell, book and candle if it didn't have such a long pedigree. For one thing it has a prefix that would never allow you to work out what the word means from first principles, and for another it expresses a concept that no true pedant would accept as a logical possibility ("you can't have something that is more essential than 'essential'"). The only appropriate way to deal with such a threat to pedantry is for the pedant to combust spontaneously.

"Jaws", the quintessential shark movie.

Without looking it up, doesn't quintessential have something to do with a 'fifth' essence, more heavenly than the other four elements which make up earthly things?

>14 binders:
I can't comment, because I did look it up.

oh! I meant that I hadn't looked it up, and hoped someone here would :)
(I can't seem to find my good dictionary)

I suspect thorold was just being pendantic ;-)

thorold was just being pendantic
...I'm sure there's a 1066 and all that joke there, somewhere.

And binders is completely correct, of course.

it's a meme from Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.