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Comment by SahAssar | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: why use words like "antepenultimate" that are not in common use and don't convey any more meaning than a more common form (like third-last)?

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Language, like programming skill or physical muscles, develops under use. Failure to extend beyond quotidian usage and trepidation over sesquipedalian terms will result in atrophy.

Someone probably learned a new word today here. Or was reminded of an unfamiliar one.

And yes, there's virtue as well in clarity. Sometimes that comes from precision.

Of course, like programming, there's also something to be said for adhering to readability guidelines. ;)

It was easy enough to suss out the meaning based on context.

// No comments needed to explain this one!

But it wasn't more precise.

Antepenultimate is actually in more common use than third last!

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=antepenultimat...

Personally, I like fun words like that, much more than pretentious words like "access" and "empower." YMMV.

Good question. While I enjoy witty or even flamboyant writing, there is plenty of writing that is hard to understand on purpose, and I despise that (postmodern French philosophers come to mind). It seems here I've used a word that is less common and more distracting than I had thought (though it seems some people enjoyed it).

As a person who has English as a second language (not the only one on HN) I'm interested in what is your second language, and if you have the knowledge of so rare words in your second language.

We're here because the same sophisticated discussions in new technologies don't happen in our language. Please make what you write accessible to us as well.

Antepenultimate is perfectly clear while an uncommon phrase like “third-last” is ambiguous, prone to possible fence post error: is it the first of two before the final sentence or third from last (a reasonable interpretation in UK and Australia, at least) which would mean it would be followed by three sentences.

Maybe you grew up speaking a language where penultimate and antepenultimate's cognates are in common use, like Spanish.

I still remember hearing a Mexican friend whose English was, at the time, very basic use the word "polemical" and I could hardly believe it. I'm not sure most English speakers could use it correctly; I'm all but certain that I at the time couldn't.

Just look at the sibling replies to see how delightful this new word is to some other folks here!

Sometimes using a word outside the register [0] or literary style is just a way to include a nice lexical nugget.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(sociolinguistics)

Because people are encouraged to look up and learn a new word!

Because adhering to a 6th grade vocabulary is tedious.

If people never used rare words or poetic turns of phrase, then communication would just be unbearably dull.

It's a class signifier. It informs readers that the person using the word is smart and therefore his opinion should be respected.

It's the same reason a doctor might use words like "etiology" instead of "cause".

Because we're not writing instruction manuals here.

After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good’, for instance. If you have a word like ‘good’, what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well—better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of ‘good’, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning, or ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want something stronger still.

> After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good’, for instance. If you have a word like ‘good’, what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well—better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not.

Aside from the 1984 reference (which is appreciated), the fact is that hanging a negative prefix (or suffix) on an adjective doesn't actually capture the meaning of the antonym. Or if it is defined to be equivalent, then you're missing out on various useful shades of meaning. Consider the uses of the phrases 'not good', 'not very good', 'not bad', 'not too bad', etc.

For example, 'not good' often doesn't actually mean 'bad', it is (usually) closer in meaning to 'not good enough', or perhaps 'mediocre'. When 'not good' actually does mean 'bad' or even 'very bad' it is because the speaker is using understatement.

Orwell was trying to make a point about the totalization of language and constraining thinking to promote binary thinking (us/them, for/against, good/bad). But he failed to really account for human perversity, which would have immediately produced phrases in NewSpeak such as 'not ungood', 'un-doubleplus ungood', etc., not to mention the use of sarcasm, which in the UK can be so deadpan that it is undetectable unless you have a lot of context.

Oddly, while Orwell obviously understood both satire and parody, and employed both to great effect, sarcasm seems to have largely eluded him. His characters are nearly always earnest and sincere. A few are insincere, euphemistic, even mendacious, but I don't think many (or any?) are ever sarcastic. It's an odd omission.

Dictionaries exist.

Anyone is welcome to look up words they don’t understand.

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