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Re:I Owe It All to Community College by mtVessel on Wednesday January 14, 2015 @08:15PM (#8890335)
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!

Re:I Owe It All to Community College by jejones3141 on Wednesday January 14, 2015 @09:37PM (#8890591)
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!
Re:I Owe It All to Community College by mtVessel on Wednesday January 14, 2015 @10:34PM (#8890757)
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.

Re:I Owe It All to Community College by jacalata on Wednesday January 14, 2015 @10:47PM (#8890790)
> Biweekly means every two weeks.

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

Re:I Owe It All to Community College by mtVessel on Thursday January 15, 2015 @12:52PM (#8894078)
Hmm. Guess I should have looked it up before posting. Serves me right for not being more bi-curious.
Re:I Owe It All to Community College by thedufer on Wednesday January 14, 2015 @11:40PM (#8890909)
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-

Re:I Owe It All to Community College by merrua on Thursday January 15, 2015 @05:15AM (#8891748)
> Fortnightly doesn't mean anything outside of the Commonwealth

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

Re:I Owe It All to Community College by teh_klev on Thursday January 15, 2015 @07:26AM (#8892148)
In the spirit the correctness and accuracy, which Commonwealth? :)
Re:I Owe It All to Community College by mtVessel on Thursday January 15, 2015 @12:48PM (#8894041)
Point taken. Um...the one(s) where a 'fortnight' is still a thing?