Hacker News Reader

Comment by mtVessel | Hacker News Reader

Biweekly means every two weeks. Semiweekly means twice a week. (Fortnightly doesn't mean anything outside of the Commonwealth.)

Please keep (politely) correcting people. It's only us against the hordes!

View on HN

OTOH, were it not for bad Latin speakers, we wouldn't have the Romance languages. A John Simon/William Safire of the era is an important source of data on their development--he wrote a list of proper Latin terms and the corresponding words in the bad Latin he was seeing and/or hearing. Dang it, it's not caballus, it's equus!

So you're saying that when I correct someone publicly, I'm not being an insufferable pedant, I'm contemporaneously documenting usage for future linguists!

Ooh, I'm gonna get so much mileage out of that one.

> Biweekly means every two weeks.

Since when, exactly? http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/18553?rskey=7qC25f&result=2#ei...

While it has meant both every two weeks and twice a week for a long time, this is an interesting case where convincing people otherwise would pretty clearly improve our language. Even the page you linked to implies this:

> The ambiguous usage is confusing, and might be avoided by the use of semi-

Hmm. Guess I should have looked it up before posting. Serves me right for not being more bi-curious.

> Fortnightly doesn't mean anything outside of the Commonwealth

Really? I live and learn. I thought that was commonplace.

In the spirit the correctness and accuracy, which Commonwealth? :)

Point taken. Um...the one(s) where a 'fortnight' is still a thing?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com