A friend and I were catching up, and working our way though our list of mutual acquaintances.

“How’s your sister?” I asked.

“Same as ever, she’s the penultimate gossip.”

“Who,” I asked “is the ultimate gossip?” I asked, presuming that after such an in depth catch up either of us were likely nominees.

My friend look flummoxed, and conceded that she assumed penultimate to be an intensified form of ultimate. It’s a relatively easy thing to misanalyse; it’s not as though the pen- prefix makes the meaning particularly clear. It’s from the Latin paene ‘almost,’ but that doesn’t really help.

It’s not a word that gets thrown around a lot in daily conversation. I remember distinctly learning the meaning of this word - it was while I was studying Polish, of all things. In Polish the stress of a word is always on the second last syllable - but it sounds much classier to say “the penultimate syllable.” Unless you learnt the word in Polish lessons, or through competitive sporting finals then it’s not likely you’ve come across this word much in your life.

Stories like this are good to share because the more we all acknowledge that even the most educated people have gaps in their linguistic knowledge then the less we can be stressed about occasionally getting things a bit wrong.