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Joined: Nov 2002
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My god! Both points of view make perfectly good sense to me. I'm just glad there is such a word as preantepenultimate, and that there is actually a large body of people who know that "penultimate" doesn't mean "the very last".
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Carpal Tunnel
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there is actually a large body of people who know
Welcome home, birdfeed.
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addict
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Count me in with eta and WW on this. 
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Joined: Nov 2002
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Welcome home, birdfeed.
Aw shucks. I'm touched. There are those who would spell it "tetched" and mean something else entirely.
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Joined: Dec 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Ah-ite. Let's try *this.
You're at the last one. That'll be the ultimate. Count one forward from the last. You're now at the penultimate. Now count two forward from the last one. Where are you now?
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old hand
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old hand
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Carpal Tunnel
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In reply to:
Count one forward from the last. You're now at the penultimate. Now count two forward from the last one. Where are you now?
Well, I'm in a different place, of course, because you've switched the type of numbers from ordinal to cardinal. The definition tsuwm questioned used ordinal numbers and that's what we were looking at.
Take a look at "what we were looking at" as a clause. The ultimate word is "at"; the penultimate word is "looking."
OK, Faldage, what is the antepenultimate word in the clause? If you know that "antepnultimate" means third from last position, isn't it a normal mental operation to count back, point to "at" and saying "first," then to "looking" and saying "second" and finally to "were" and saying "third"? It's just how we would count ordinal positions there.
Apparently for some readers "third from last" means fourth position and for others "third from last" means third position. I can't agree with birdfeed and say that both ways of counting make sense to me because for me, each and every time, "third from last" would clearly be the antepenultimate position.
Oh, and by the way, the reason I used "draft" for that musical score was to imply that measure numbers weren't on the score. I was imagining a draft of a work without measure numbers, and should have stated as much.
Interesting discussion here, anyway, to show, once again, the sometimes ambiguity of our most marvelous language.
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
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>Apparently for some readers "third from last" means fourth position and for others "third from last" means third position.
the point I've tried to make here is that I (it's all about me, you know) don't know what "third from the last" means; whereas I know exactly what "third from the end", "third from the right", or "last but two" signifies.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Maybe we should send a copy of this thread to Jay Leno and ask him to have his crew ask the men on the street to point to the third from last number in a row of numbers to see what the results would be.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Just had dinner with my parents. I wrote out these numbers on a card:
1...2...3...4...5...6...7...8
...without the ellipses.
I put the card in front of my father and asked, "What is the third from last number? This is not a trick question."
He pointed to the six.
I did the same for my mom, who is shrewd, and she counted backwards from the eight and stopped on six. She said, "Six."
I thanked them. They asked what it was all about, and I said, "People on the board are discussing what the meaning of 'third from last' is."
Mama said, "I'd think you'd have better things to do."
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