Generate the answer for a given question. The question requires common knowledge of English. Make sure that the answer is in detail, long, consistent with the context, and requires general knowledge of English. To be less repetitive, please vary your language for each question. Give a proper explanation to answer, and if necessary, provide the definition of various terms. And conclude your answer if it's long. If you have used other resources (e.g., Merriam Webster's.) to answer the question, include citations in your answer. You don't need to paraphrase the context of your resources, but make sure that your answer is consistent and complete.
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Question: Is penultimate commonly used in English, or are its variations (such as second to last) more common? I need to use it in conjunction with the expressions First Payment Date and Last Payment Date to name variables while programming. In my mother language (Portuguese) Penultimate Payment Date would be fine, but it feels strange in English. (I know feels strange is not very helpful, but I'd like to know how to convey the meaning in the most natural way.).

Answer: Someone I know who is a native speaker of Spanish and a professor at a university in the United States has complained that when he used the word 'penultimate' in class, the students don't know what he's talking about. The word is perfectly, unimpeachably, 100% correct. It is a bit of an upscale, literary word though. It certainly is a 'term of art' in fields like linguistics, where it is used commonly to refer to syllables. I searched for the word in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, and divided the results by section: spoken, fiction, magazine, newspaper, and academic, and got these results: spoken: 10 fiction: 53 magazine: 55 newspaper: 36 academic: 93 total: 247 So, it is certainly used in all areas of English, with a moderate skew towards higher registers like academic writing. Depending on the intended audience, a writer contemplating using the word 'penultimate' should consider that there is a relatively high likelihood that word will not be understood. Instead of 'penultimate', the phrasing in common usage is either 'next to last' or 'second to last'. Both of those should be universally understood. Interestingly, Google Ngrams shows that the word 'penultimate' rose in usage (in published books) steadily from 1800 to about 1990, and since 1990 it has shown a steep dropoff, taking us back to usage levels from the late 1960s. The better-understood terms 'second to last' and 'next to last' are less common (again, though, in published booksGoogle Ngrams tells us nothing about spoken usage), with 'next to last' having more historical usage but a slow tapering off of usage since 1960 and 'second to last' increasing in usage from 1970 on, with both enjoying approximately the same usage today.


Question: Often, I encounter situations (particularly with software or electronics, though occasionally with people) where bugs or strange events happen that cause me to lose trust in said software maintaining the integrity of my data, or said technology being reliable 'in the clutch' (or even scenarios where a person or business entity change a predictable, relied-on pattern of behavior, belief or expectation). Sometimes I feel so strongly about the broken trust, that I feel forced to stop trusting (even if such events leading to the distrust were unintentional). I may still use said software, but I continue to do so very cautiously at that point. The word I believe I'm looking for is similar to 'ized' words, in that it describes a state of 'forced distrust' assigned to myself, not the state or act of the object/person breaking the trust (e.g. 'I've been/become xxxxxxxized by such-and-such...'). I often want to use the word 'disenfranchised' to describe such a state, but I'm not sure that's 100% suitable to the various contexts or the concept of lost trust (even though whatever trust I had was likely unfounded anyway, simply because, at least in the context of software, that trust is simply the lack of distrust due to having not yet experienced any bugs/issues that have built up a negative rapport with said software and what I expect it to do without fail). So what's the word I'm looking for, if such a single word exists?.

Answer: You're disillusioned. disillusioned adj having lost one's ideals, illusions, or false ideas about someone or something; disenchanted {Collins English Dictionary} disillusioned (adjective) disenchanted, disappointed, enlightened, indifferent, disabused, sadder and wiser ... {Collins Thesaurus of the English Language}


Question: I'm a little bit confused with the following phrase. I was reading an article about concurrency in Java and there was a sentence saying: It is worth noting that both unlockRead() and unlockWrite() calls notifyAll() rather than notify(). This phrase seemed quite strange to me. What does it mean?.

Answer:
'It is worth noting that' simply means 'here's something, which you should remember:' or 'here's something you should pay attention to:' or 'here's something that is worth reading and remembering:' It's that simple. Regarding (1), there is no connection at all to 'apropos' or 'besides...' Regarding (2), it always means exactly the same thing. It simply means 'Here's an interesting point:' (There is utterly no connection in any way to 'useless' or 'costs nothing'.) It is worth noting that, the ELL site exists for basic questions about the meanings of phrases.