When the exam results were announced, Tom was the second last boy in class.
Is second last correct? If so, is a hyphen needed between the two words.
Many thanks.
American English may be different...but to me "second to last" sounds better.
0 Replies
Setanta
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Mon 21 Jul, 2008 08:01 pm
Re: second last
dlowan wrote:
tanguatlay wrote:
When the exam results were announced, Tom was the second last boy in class.
Is second last correct? If so, is a hyphen needed between the two words.
Many thanks.
American English may be different...but to me "second to last" sounds better.
I agree that second to last would be preferable. No hyphen is needed.
0 Replies
McTag
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Tue 22 Jul, 2008 04:02 am
"Second to last" is definitely AmE.
I would say second-last. I think I definitely prefer it with the hyphen.
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Setanta
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Tue 22 Jul, 2008 04:40 am
Definitely American, huh?
I take it then, that we can assume by inference that you consider Australians to speak the American language?
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McTag
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Tue 22 Jul, 2008 06:57 am
I suppose they are like the British, and much influenced by (and prone to copy) Americanisms.
Check it out, bro, know what I'm sayin?
I'm holding out against homogeneity in my (increasingly) lonely redoubt.
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contrex
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Tue 22 Jul, 2008 08:58 am
I didn't think "second to last" [1.4 million Google hits] or its equally acceptable equivalent "second from last" [42,000 hits] were particularly associated with any particular branch of English. Pre-penultimate [1,500 hits] has a nice ring to it.
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McTag
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Tue 22 Jul, 2008 09:51 am
My goodness, where are you going with this?
Penultimate is second-last.
Pre-penultimate (!) would be third-last, no?
Google hits, schmitz. More people read The Sun than The Guardian, and what does that prove?
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spendius
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Tue 22 Jul, 2008 11:05 am
What's up with "next to bottom"?
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contrex
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Tue 22 Jul, 2008 12:08 pm
McTag wrote:
My goodness, where are you going with this?
Penultimate is second-last.
Pre-penultimate (!) would be third-last, no?
Google hits, schmitz. More people read The Sun than The Guardian, and what does that prove?
Penultimate means "next to last". I always supposed that it also meant "first from last", and that therefore "second from last" was the one before that; I agree I was wrong.
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username
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Tue 22 Jul, 2008 12:27 pm
I agree with the Auserican consensus here. And I think the third person back is "antepenultimate" (not sure about hyphens there) rather than "pre-penultimate".
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username
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Tue 22 Jul, 2008 12:30 pm
yep. "antepenultimate" with no hyphen. "prepenultimate", with or without a hyphen, doesn't seem to exist, but I'll give contrex props for inventing it. dictionary.com'ed it.
Different journals or institutions use different style guides, so it is pointless to try to stick to one. There is a person at each institution called a copy editor whose job it is to have this guide by his or her side and to change each writer's texts so that they conform to the rules. So I don't have to worry about them. It's like picking a typeface or a point size. Not my job.
And now I - and you, and all the copy editors - have to worry about these vagaries even less. That's because the new edition of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has done away with about 16,000 hyphens. The editors of the dictionary have decided, in an awesome display of ruthless language modification, that the conventions of hyphenation were arbitrary and needed simplification. They changed most of the hyphenated words - such as leap-frog and ice-cream - by turning them into one word (leapfrog) or two distinct words (ice cream).
Quote:
As the Oxford University Press style guide once said, "If you take hyphens seriously, you will surely go mad."[/color] (Or should that be styleguide?)
I like hyphenated words. This is going to take some getting used to.
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