Can I play?
We don't say that we are the
beginning person in a line we say that we are the
first person in line. Why? Because being a
first person is easy to number and it doesn't cost us any wasted energy to be exact.
We usually don't say that we are the
end person in a line because it can be heard as
in person, so we just say
last, or
last person. And if we are last in a long line it is sometimes very hard to count just how last we are, so we just say
last and leave the numbering out.
But if we want to be picky and fix our position more precisely in a line we can count forward from the beginning or backwards from the end, whichever way in easiest to count. This is done 1, 2, 3, etc., always starting the count relative to the first or last person at either terminal end. That way we can then convey our position to anyone who'll listen to our happy gloats or our sour complaints.
Big deal, no problem, until some high mucketymucks decided that we needed to name the three positions relative to the last position of the line with some polysyllablic clumsy names that mostly catered to showing-off. I diagram below...
Beginning of line, numbered.....
[Box Office] [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [etc.] then...
Middle of line unnumbered and unnamed...
[x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x]
End of line, four named...
[x] [x] [x] [x] [?] [?] [?] [?] <--< (last person or unit)
______________________^ultimate (last) position
___________________^penultimate position
________________^antepenulitumate position
_____________^preantepenulitumate position
No matter that these cumbersome words would never be used by decent God fearing men, they soon found extensive use among hoodwinkers, lawyers, and polititians, whose jobs depend on words of obfuscation.
Then one day along came tswum, a man who never left a tweak untwated, a crafty man who quickly found a soul cell mate in the man Faldage, who, when not on line, argues with stumps.
No, no, no, I don't mean to imply that they argued with the meanings of the three awkward constructions, they didn't, they argued with the way the definition was given.
And so as not to mislead, tswum and faldage preferred
fourth from the end as opposed to
fourth from the last.And grit my teeth, they are right.
