I am an engineer, not a writer, and yet I find myself responsible for writing an SOP. I am not enjoying this.
How can I succinctly state that something is important but it’s not the most important thing, that there is something else of higher importance? Here is my draft so far:
“These products are to be first and foremost, safe, accurate, and effective. It is of penultimate importance that they be developed as quickly as reasonably practicable.”
So, speed is of secondary importance. But speed is still highly important. That’s what I’m trying to say.
Is that the correct usage of penultimate? Thanks much, in advance.
Penultimate means second to last, not secondary. Your sentence doesn’t mean that speed is of secondary importance, it means there is only one thing less important than speed.
I have never heard “penultimate” used in this way. It either means “second to last” or (in a growing misuse) an emphatic from of “ultimate”'s meaning “best/greatest.” Nobody reading that sentence will think it means “of secondary importance,” at least not IMHO.
These products are to be first and foremost, safe, accurate, and effective. Secondarily, they need to be developed as quickly as reasonably practicable.
To me that sounds awkward.
(Maybe it’s time for this to be moved to IMHO. I’ll ping the mods.)
If you wanted to accentuate the importance of the first three, you could try: while these products should be developed as quickly as reasonably practicable, they must be safe, accurate and effective.
I think a good rule of thumb is to NEVER use the word penultimate, because even people who know what it means won’t be sure that you know what it means.
Seconded. It is almost always used wrong. People seem to think it means “more than ultimate”, which makes me wonder if they know what the definition of “ultimate” is.
I think it’s still pretty iron clad. For example, you have the ultimate option. You might think I’m talking about one ultimate option but I’m talking about the other ultimate option.
As I understand it penultimate doesn’t mean “second best” or even “second from the start”, it means “second from the end”. “The ultimate weapon” doesn’t actually mean the best weapon, it means the last weapon - the one that once you use it, there will be no more fighting at all.
So when you reach the penultimate item on the list of things to deal with you’ve almost finished fixing everything and are pretty much scraping the bottom of the barrel.
It comes from the fact that the last syllable of a Latin word is the “ultima.” The second-to-last syllable is the “penultima.” That’s all there is to it. Penultimate is “second to last.”
That would be ‘here’ in your statement. And the antipenultimate word would be ‘there’, I think. But my geometry may be skewed. Wrapped-around. Sinking fast. Ouch.
I think we’re torturing the language. Pass another firebrand.
I had a much-admired music professor in college[sup]*[/sup] who liked to put short examples on the blackboard for the class to examine in detail. He referred to the last measure as the ultimate, the second-to-last, the penultimate, and the third, the ante-penultimate. Being the class smartass, I couldn’t avoid asking what measure came next in the sequence.
