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Chris -- 2025-05-10
Forgive me for potentially misusing your forums, as I’m not sure I’m bringing you an eggcorn. But I read this copy on the Netflix “at-a-glance” page for the 1985 TV movie version of Death of A Salesman:
” In this affecting television adaptation of Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, penultimate actor Dustin Hoffman truly “becomes” Willy Loman…”
http://www.netflix.com/MovieDisplay?mov … 450522_1_0
Could that possibly mean anything but that Dustin Hoffman is our second-to-last actor? I looked up the word ‘penultimate’ in the OED just to see if there was some definition of the word, however obscure, that I was missing; but I can’t really make ‘penultimate’ work in that sentence, except that it sounds like “pinnacle” + “ultimate”—an impressive combination.
I also found this usage of “penultimate” (used specifically with “actor”) on other sites, like this one:
“KIERNAN, THOMAS SIR LARRY The Life of Lawrence Olivier.
...A penetrating, revealing biography of this penultimate actor…”
“Not many politicians would have called them “my” delegates, but Brown, the penultimate politician, has always been a throwback to old-style politics, a la Richard Daley of Chicago.”
from “Once Upon A Time, California Politics Were All About Willie” in the CS Monitor, Jan 9, 2004
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0109/p01s … tml?usaNav
Am I missing something?
Last edited by thefixedstars (2006-08-06 21:56:47)
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There’s a brief entry on this use of “penultimate” on Paul Brians’ excellent Common Errors in English website:
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/penultimate.html
This is what I think of as a “fancy malapropism.” Since bigger/rarer often seems better, people assume that the longer, rarer word “penultimate” has to be even “more ultimate” than “ultimate.”
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