No Stupid Questions

2174 readers

70 users here now

There is no such thing as a Stupid Question!

Don't be embarrassed of your curiosity; everyone has questions that they may feel uncomfortable asking certain people, so this place gives you a nice area not to be judged about asking it. Everyone here is willing to help.

ex. How do I change oil
ex. How to tie shoes
ex. Can you cry underwater?

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca still apply!

Thanks for reading all of this, even if you didn't read all of this, and your eye started somewhere else, have a watermelon slice 🍉.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

179

Why does bi-weekly mean "every two weeks?" This has always bothered me because intuitively it should mean "twice a week." (self.nostupidquestions)

submitted 11 months ago by LemmyKnowsBest to c/[email protected]

175 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Similar case in point: "bimonthly" means "twice a month." That makes sense.

But the definition for "bi-weekly" does not make sense.

What do you think?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] ook_the_librarian 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

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