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How did the word last come to mean both the final time ("this is the last time I do this") and the previous time "the last time I did this it was a big fiasco, that's why I'm doing it over".
This doesn't make sense to me. We have the same thing in French with the same word - dernière/dernier
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Carpal Tunnel
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I dunno, belM. Seems obvious to me. It's just a matter of whether you're cutting off your time scale at the present or extending it to positive infinity.
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Perhaps because the final instance was, by definition, the last-prior instance?
As in the old joke:
Q: When you lose your keys, why do you always find them in the last place you look?
A: Because once you find them, you stop looking.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Dear belMarduk: Since English is your second language, you notice things I do not. That is one of the good things about having you with us. My dictionary says "last" is an alternate superlative of "late". and gives eleven definitions of it, and a great many more as adverb,verb intransitive and transitive, noun, etc.etc.
You cannot be like the shoemaker who is supposed to stick to his last.(Meaning mind his own business.)
His "last" is the wooden form on which a leather shoe is built.
So thanks for calling my attention to so many subtlties I had overlooked. Bill
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old hand
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This post reminds me of an ambiguity in a song by Barenaked Ladies about a guy who dies falling asleep at the wheel of his car. He keeps singing (about his girlfriend/wife), "You're the last thing on my mind" and I haven't yet decided if they mean (a) she was the final thing on his mind before he died, or (b) he was thinking about everything else except her when he died. Anyone else know the song and have an opinion?
This ambiguity may be intentional - if the guys in Barenaked Ladies had more time and were less famous I'm sure they would join the group here. They are true wordophiles, you can tell from their songs.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Bean, the expression, "It was the last thing on my mind" implies to me that the person wasn't thinking about the subject at all. If something were the last thing on a person's mind, it would be on that back burner in the brain -- the one way back there where the unconscious brain is a bubbling up its trouble.
But you wrote that the lyric was "You're the last thing on my mind" -- and that is present tense [are] and that suggests that very cool ambiguity you sense, and I do, too. If something is the last thing a person thinks of, "You are the last thing I think of before I go to sleep," then that something has come into conscious thinking. But when you throw the subject into the phrase that means not to think of something at all, i.e., 'That was the last thing on my mind,' and chuck the whole phrase into the present, 'You are the last thing on my mind,'--well, there's the ambiguity. I like it. I like the ambiguity here--like it a lot in lyrics and poetry. Wish I had all the words to look at to get a sense of whether the ambiguity is in line with the lyric you've given us here.
Guess I'll go google Barenaked Ladies now..
Best regards,
Wordwind
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old hand
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Dear WW, You'd better be careful Googling "Barenaked Ladies".  The official website is http://www.bnlmusic.com. I don't know if they have lyrics there. But if you can wait until later I can PM them to you from the CD liner notes.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Bean,
Just tried googling them on the school server. "Access denied"--even when I next tried googling, " 'You're the last thing on my mind' Ladies " ... ! The school server's very straightlaced!
Barenaked regards,
WW
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old hand
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"You're the last thing on my mind" -- and that is present tense [are] and that suggests that very cool ambiguity you sense, and I do, too.
That reminds me of a girl who, a very long time ago, told me "you are the kind of guy I shall turn to if I have nowhere else to go".
By the way, the ambiguity of "the last time" also exists in German (das letzte Mal).
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Carpal Tunnel
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if they mean (a) she was the final thing on his mind before he died, or (b) he was thinking about everything else except her when he died. Augh! No, no, no! I hate ambiguity! I want it clear! No fair of them! Grr! HBC, btw. 
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