In Scala, how to use Ordering[T] with List.min or List.max and keep code readable

Question

In Scala 2.8, I had a need to call List.min and provide my own compare function to get the value based on the second element of a Tuple2. I had to write this kind of code:

Answer 1

list.min(Ordering.fromLessThan[(String, Int)](_._2 < _._2))

Which is still too verbose, of course. I'd probably declare it as a val or object.