Big Question: Can anything really be Penultimate? Dennis Miller style RANT.

[white_swan]

So I was looking for a better thesaurus than the one at dictionary.com today, and I found a page where they also had this great word quiz.  You have to match one obscure long difficult word with its obscure difficult synonym.  Of course I fell in love at "cynatium," the first word I saw.  Anyway, they had the word penultimate there.  At the end of

Comments

[left_fielder]

well, "penultimate" is literally "next to last", by inference "next to highest". One shy of "ultimate".

So, the definition in a particular usage would sort of depend on what was meant by "ultimate".

But you maybe figured that out already.