Alas, once again, we find ourselves heading down the home stretch of a line of classic Disney comic books! The coming week will bring us the penultimate issue of the Kaboom! classic Disney comic book series -- MICKEY MOUSE # 309!
We'll be looking at that issue starting on Monday, with another, closer look on Wednesday -- the day of release!
"Penultimate!"
It's a word I've always liked, but have never really understood.
How did it come to mean what it does? It sure doesn't LOOK like what it's supposed to mean... at least not to me!
Just curious... When this same sad occasion occurred for Western Publishing's line of Warner Bros.comics, was the next-to-last issue of the PORKY PIG title... (Oh, I almost can't type this!) the "Pig-Penultimate Issue"? With that, I'll be silent until Monday when we look at MICKEY MOUSE # 309.
Penultimately, that is!
2 comments:
A lot of people say "penultimate" when they obviously mean "ultimate." Apparently, they think that the "pen-" is an intensifier. If you use it that way, people who know better will recognize the mistake, and even people who don't know the difference will probably think it's pretentious.
And, what about Marvel's "Ultimates" line? Does it mean that the comics they published before were only penultimate?
Honestly, I never much cared for the term “Penultimate” myself, and employed it here, because MICKEY MOUSE # 309 was the “next to last” issue of the “Core Four Disney comic books" – and all the more so for the sake of the “Porky Pig joke”.
It never sounded ”right” to me, for similar reasons to those you suggest.
But, even Microsoft Word’s thesaurus offers:
“Last but one”, “Second to last”, “One before the last”, and “Next to last”
So, I guess the use is proper, and I liked the “Porky Pig joke”.
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