jrtom

So a few minutes ago, my boss came over and asked my advice, on behalf of another coworker, for what one should call the second-largest element in a set, given that the largest is called (unsurprisingly) 'max'.

I thought for about a second, and came back with 'penultimax'.

(Another coworker chimed in and pointed out that the third-largest element should be 'antepenultimax', which is one of the reasons why I like working here. It was later observed that everything after that should properly be lumped into 'preantepenultimax', which brought us back to LISP/Scheme's 'car' and 'cdr'...for which those languages already have a convention for combining, which may be just as well in the general case, as admittedly 'penultimaxpreantepenultimax' would be rather more of a mouthful for 'fifth largest' than 'caddddr'. Or maybe 'ca4dr'. :) )

The original requestor, sadly, was not immediately entranced by either 'cadr' (my second suggestion) or 'penultimax' as names, but this is one of those cases in which I don't care whether anyone else thinks I'm funny or not, I _know_ I am. :)

(It turns out (http://www.google.com/search?q=penultimax) that I'm not the first to think of this name, but I still think I rock. I'm just saying.)