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.

Example Input: 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.).
Example Output: 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.

Example Input: I am looking for a word that incorporates all, or most, of the following (when referring to a sentence or a piece of technical literature): Highly academic Not useful (despite being technically correct) Overly verbose/eloquent Superfluous (to be honest, this seems to incorporate the rest, but I want to see if there is a better word here) Sample sentence (I hear it's required): There are many ____ white-paper definitions which only serve to dazzle the reader with the author's purported intelligence.
Example Output: The two most common, apart from Lux's pretentious, are going to be pedantic in the manner of a pedant, hence a. excessively concerned with minutiae. b. needlessly displaying academic learning. and pompous (originally) characterized by pomp and splendor. (now the primary sense) affectedly solemn and self-important. You'd use the first if the important aspect was how unimportant the information being shared was, the later if you wanted to emphasize the (undeserved) self-importance with which it was being shared. Since scholars have been writing for ages and this kind of behavior was, if anything, more common during the era when all scholars were monks, there are absolute scads of synonyms for variants and subvarieties. Some, like precious, could be considered gendered slurs; others, like bookish or nerdy, may not be taken as negative at all in our present culture. Two of my favorites are mumpsimus and sumpsimus.

Example Input: I came upon this letter when reading a book, I couldn't find its name on the internet, you can imagine how hard it is to search about it. What is the name of the letter that follows 'sample space'? I know it's not really an English question, but I think this site is best fit for the question than say, the mathematics site.
Example Output:
It's an S written in a fraktur font used by mathematicians. This one is easy to find out using Detexify.

