Strictly speaking, "ultimate" means "last", not "best". It's often figuratively employed in the latter sense to suggest that the thing so described is the final word on the subject, after which nothing more need be said, but if we're being real technical, describing a game or movie that was so bad it killed its entire franchise as the "ultimate" is in fact correct.
@ffoxer replied:
Now I'm thinking about the prefix "pen," which as far as I can think I may have only ever seen in "penultimate"
It's Latin for "nearly" or "almost", and it does pop up in a few other English words. "Penultimate", "penumbra" and "peninsula" are the only ones I can think of that you'd even remotely expect to encounter in everyday speech, though; the rest are all medical or mathematical jargon.
#so peninsula means what? #almost island? #lmao (via @actualanxiousswampwitch)
That is the actual etymology of the word "peninsula", yes.
in slavic languages it's usually called half-island, and it's interesting that the description can be more or less accurate depending on the width of the corridor connecting it to the mainland.
for instance crimea is much more of an almost-island, while something like arabia or anatolia would be half-islands, and continental denmark would be somewhere in the middle.
it is also interesting how often we can see peninsulseption, for instance the Kerch peninsula is within the Crimean peninsula...
