this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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English is devoid of logic in many places but bicycle and bisection seems to follow the same pattern of something two
Agree. This example is just bi- meaning two. I get why the word "flammable" was created because "inflammable" confused people to a dangerous degree. But this not getting the difference between semiweekly and biweekly and therefore, let's everyone be right is not the answer.
Unfortunately it is an answer, so maybe we're better off not using confusing words that mean both at the same time and using "twice a week" or "every other week" ยฏ\_(ใ)_/ยฏ
Using those words in banking and even assigning definitive meaning to them looks legalese to me, like when you're using terminology not to be precise but to be harder to understand by laymen
Absolutely. I know I'm tilting at windmills. I'm being idealist, not prescriptive. But at least in legalese, if one were to write "hencefore 'semiweekly' shall mean 'at a frequency of every 14 days'", I would think, "well they're wrong, but at least it's not confusing".
For background, I'm a mathematician. I'm used to laying out definitions.
Also am a mathematician although not work as one, I'm not used to always providing the definitions first but it could've made so many things better
Yes but bicycle means two wheels (multiplication) and to bisect something means to cut in two (division).
Yeah. Bicycle - two wheels. Bisection - two sections. Yes, you are cutting a something into parts, but it's identifying you have 2 of them after the cut. If you have 3 sections after the cutting, it's trisected.
Bisection is confusing because two cuts leaves three pieces. It should unisection. \s