OK. I've got an idea.
Let's say you're reading through a draft of a choral work, 12 pages and 120 measures long--lots of notes in each measure, highly complicated.
And let's say your group cannot get the ending of the piece right. Everything's fine till you hit the last staff--and it's as though the whole group crashes.
So, your conductor says,
"Go back three bars from the end."
Or:
(If this were a show-offy kind of word nerdy conductor)
"Return to the antepenultimate measure."
Or:
"Go back to the third measure before the end."
Or:
"Return to the third from last measure."
All these places would be the same place in my head.
I think part of the problem is we don't ordinarily hear people say, "Return to the second from last position." We just don't use second from last. We use, instead, next to last. The word next has elbowed out the word second when counting backwards in a series from first (i.e., last) position backwards into the series.
Oh, well, I've written too much about this and I don't think we're really going to come to a point of agreement.
I do agree that the words "end" and "last" have to be carefully used and are not always interchangeable, but I also believe that there are times that "end" and "last" are referring to the same thing, e.g., last page of a book = end of the book.
And to tsuwm: I'm obviously the only one here who doesn't have a problem with antepenultimate as defined above.
