A few years ago, I met with Zelda (fake name to protect the innocent) to talk about calendar scheduling so team meetings wouldn’t bump into each other. I asked Zelda how often a particular meeting was held, and she said it was held fortnight. Umm, what? I had to ‘fess up that I didn’t know what that word meant. Zelda said it meant the meeting would be held every two weeks.

Maybe it was just me, but I didn’t understand why she just didn’t say “every two weeks” or “bi-weekly.” After our meeting, it reminded me about an SDA session on business writing. The speaker said your writing should be clear, concise, and conversational. The speaker said to question whether it’s conversational by asking, “Can I say this out loud without sounding foolish?”  So yeah, I am not going to use the word fortnight when I’m explaining meeting occurrences to coworkers. I’m choosing to stick with every two weeks rather than “the meeting will be held on Friday fortnight.” (I searched on fortnight and according to vocabulary.com, the word is still used in Great Britain and that in the U.S., folks typically just say “two weeks.”)

Which brings me to Taylor Swift. The lyrics to one of her songs includes, “For a fortnight there we were …”. It’s a catchy song. I guess it’s less cumbersome to sing “For two weeks there we were…”.

It will be interesting to see if diehard Swifties start using fortnight conversationally, now that TS has brought it to the forefront.

Special thanks to  Judy Beebe, FSDA,  of the Seattle Chapter, for providing our current Word Nerd feature.