xkcd #3232: Countdown Standard
Title text:
Anyone who is caught counting ‘three … two … one … zero … GO!’ will be punished with a lifetime of eating only ISO standard food samples.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3232/
Biweekly is another one. Two times a week, or once every two weeks (also called a fortnight)?
This is one of those ones that’s a tragedy. Biweekly “should” always mean every two weeks. Twice a week is “semi-weekly”, aka every half a week.
But regardless of what it “should” mean, people use it wrong often enough that you have to check every time, not because the word is ambiguous, but because people are often mistaken.
It’s a shame, but it’s part of human communication 😅
Human communication sucks. It should be illegal.
Tell me about it.
sorry that’s illegal
Fortnightly already exists as a term though, why would biweekly mean the same thing?
We can have more than one way of describing things. Sometimes there is subtle nuances between the words.
No one ever uses fortnightly though. I have a hard time even remembering what it means as it’s never used.
Americans never use fortnight. I suspect this is because very few get to enjoy 2 weeks of uninterrupted vacation.
Check the podcast episode “A Problem Squared - 121 = Bi-annuals and Diagonals”. In it, Matt and Beck discuss what these terms even mean, and propose a solution.