Talk:secondmost

Something about this smells wrong to me. Should it be proscribed/nonstandard? It's like writing secondbiggest as one word. Equinox ◑ 01:56, 10 March 2018 (UTC)

• I tend to disagree, as "most" is used in comparable constructions like foremost, innermost, and outermost, while "biggest" is not. bd2412 T 02:14, 10 March 2018 (UTC)
  • Interesting. I got here today because I went scouring across dictionaries today looking to see whether "nextmost" and "secondmost" have any standing lexicographically to date. I found that they have essentially zero to date, but descriptively they are well attested in corpus attestations, which is not surprising because they are morphologically parallel with foremost, innermost, outermost, leftmost, rightmost, topmost, bottommost, forwardmost, rearmost. Thus plenty of ghits for the quoted form "nextmost common" whereas prescriptive orthography to date would prescribe only "next most common". Regarding the list that follows, one might say several worthwhile things: (a) that they are well enough attested that they deserve lexicographic coverage, although applying the label "nonstandard" is reasonable; (b) that a careful analysis of their thousands of ghit attestations would want to filter out the artifacts from the dropping/falling out of soft hyphens from OCRd texts, which would undoubtedly reduce but not annihilate their ghit counts; and that in terms of natural language, their arising is predictable. firstmost, secondmost, thirdmost, fourthmost, fifthmost, sixthmost, seventhmost, eighthmost, ninthmost. Quercus solaris (talk) 19:24, 9 June 2020 (UTC). Relatedly: -most#Usage notes. Quercus solaris (talk) 22:58, 9 June 2020 (UTC)
    • Also relevant here: seniormost. Quercus solaris (talk) 21:26, 15 July 2020 (UTC)

@BD2412: Those constructions are not comparable, since they are adjectives while this is apparently adverbial (see the citation!), though we call it an adjective in apparent error. Equinox ◑ 03:58, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Here's a better one: 2003, Michael John O'Brien, ‎R. Lee Lyman, Cladistics and Archaeology, p. 213: "Those two derived character states affected the location of maximum blade width (proximal quarter → secondmost proximal quarter) and the length/width ratio (3.00-3.99 → 2.00-2.99)".

That's still the "second most proximal" quarter, isn't it (the one that would be most proximal if the first wasn't there)? So still an adverb and still nothing like foremost. Equinox ◑ 04:29, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Yes, still an adverb; but still varying "most", just a different usage of "most". See foremost#Adverb. bd2412 T 04:34, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Now I think that entry is defective too! Look at the citation: "Foremost among it was...": now that's not an adverb as claimed, but an adjective... Equinox ◑ 04:37, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Still, so what, it's a bad cite. Again, a better one: 2001, Chantel Laran Sawyer Lumpkin, The Influences of Assets on the Academic Achievement of African American College Students, p. 155: "As dependent minors the foremost proximal system was family, followed by school and community". bd2412 T 04:41, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Here's another: 2013, Robert Woods, Evangelical Christians and Popular Culture: Pop Goes the Gospel, p. XXIX: "Lewis is the twentieth century's foremost popular writer and the most influential public intellectual for evangelicals". bd2412 T 04:43, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

The "foremost popular writer" is just a "foremost writer" who is popular; it's Adj+Adj+Noun, no adverb. Equinox ◑ 04:45, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

I don't think that you can definitely say that from the construction. Why, then, would the analysis by any different for "foremost proximal" and "secondmost proximal"? Or even for "foremost popular" and "secondmost popular"? Why isn't "secondmost popular network" just a "secondmost network" that is popular? How about, "Perhaps the foremost popular network for putting these sorts of ads is Google AdSense"? bd2412 T 04:51, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

A "popular writer" is a type of writer, one who writes "popular fiction" (or whatever). The construct is akin to "the foremost romance writer" or "the foremost jazz musician"; "foremost" is not adverbially modifying the subsequent word. That seems clear to me but have requested more input from Tea Room. Equinox ◑ 04:54, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

What is "foremost" doing in "the foremost popular network", then? bd2412 T 05:16, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Adj. There are good popular networks, bad popular networks, and a foremost popular network. If adverbial you might expect to be able to say "this network is foremost popular"...? Equinox ◑ 05:19, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

I'm inclined to agree with Equinox that these are not adverbial. I am not awake enough to address the original issue. DCDuring (talk) 06:07, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

It seems to me that this should be listed as a rare alt form of second most (which it thus coalmines in), which is by far the most common / standard spelling, unlike with the various words that apparently influenced this spelling in the cases where it's not just a typo, like the outermost, where "the outer most" is rare (on Ngrams). No? That would address the point about it being nonstandard. No? The part of speech is hard to judge; we list what seems like the comparable sense of best as an adjective but most as an adverb. (We currently list second best only as a noun, with only one citation, and it of the different from second-best...) - -sche (discuss) 19:34, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Sounds good to me.

I note that we have an adverb PoS section for second, but not for other ordinals that I looked at. This may not be on topic or even be the hundredth most important cleanup item here, but someone could amuse themselves by adding such sections. DCDuring (talk) 11:02, 17 July 2020 (UTC)