Saturday, January 21, 2006

Professor Gunn's Vocabulary Lesson - Podcast #7



Palpable - adj.

1: Capable of being handled, touched, or felt; tangible:
2: Easily perceived; obvious:

"It was palpable at Mood that this was a very different experience for them."

et al - adv

1: and others: used as an abbreviation of `et alii' (masculine plural) or `et aliae' (feminine plural) or `et alia' (neutral plural) when referring to a number of people

2: used as an abbreviation of `et alibi' when referring to other occurrences in a text [syn: et al., and elsewhere]

"Once again he survives. His bigger-than-life personality et al...."

Penultimate - adj.

1. Next to last.
2. Linguistics. Of or relating to the penult of a word: penultimate stress.

"Emmett has been a penultimate statesman through the entire show."

HUH? Tim, did you mean "ultimate?" Did Professor Gunn make a mistake? Hmmmmmm....

3 comments:

Marsha said...

Oops...but "penultimate" sounds classier, doesn't it? :)

Anonymous said...

From the Oxford American Thesarus

USAGE NOTE

Penultimate (= next-to-last) is sometimes misused for ultimate or quintessential —e.g.: “As our cover story points out, data warehouses have been sold by many vendors as the penultimate [read quintessential ] business solution.” ( ComputerWorld; Apr. 1, 1996.)


I think quintessential is more "Tim Gunn-Speak" than ultimate. I think I'll stick w/that in my mind.

Anonymous said...

Silly, Tim Gunn doesn't make mistakes!