Posts Tagged ‘vocabulary’

What I learned: czar

laelene Posted in what i learned,Tags:
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Last weekend I was having trouble sleeping and somehow thought about czars and czarinas, so I started to read about them again. That led me into the typical rabbit hole I was expecting at first, but then I came across an unexpected other meaning:

a person appointed by government to advise on and coordinate policy in a particular area

I mean, I guess I’d heard of a “drug czar” before, but I never really thought it was a legitimate title! These folks are appointed by the executive branch and sometimes even undergo Senate confirmation. That’s pretty official.

In the US, we have not just drug czars, but also intelligence czar, terrorism czar, cyber security czar, and even war czar (according to Wikipedia). It’s sort of fuzzy how and why they came to be, but it’s definitely an established practice to have these folks who have a topical focus but may be restrained by resources.

At work, we decided this would be fun to adopt, so I dubbed myself the business czar, which my colleagues quickly turned into a hilarious pun: the biz-czar (sounds like bizarre, haha). I decided our head of IT should be the tech czar and our boss could be the tsar czar. What do you think?

Biweekly, bimonthly

laelene Posted in general blog,Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
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Today I was putting together a spreadsheet to compare offerings from some companies we’re evaluating. As I was listing the frequency of something they do, I was going to put biweekly, but then I wasn’t sure how that would be interpreted. One thing that has always frustrated me (and confused me to no end) is this term with its conflicting meaning. Let’s take a look at the definition:

bi·week·ly
adjective & adverb
  1. appearing or taking place every two weeks or twice a week.
noun
  1. a periodical that appears every two weeks or twice a week.

 

I mean, is this somebody’s idea of a joke? How do you allow one single word to simultaneously mean two things that don’t jive with each other? They differ mathematically by a factor of 4. FOUR! What if I demanded my paycheck (paid out biweekly) twice a week? After all, that’s biweekly too. Then I’d get paid four times as much, given each check amount is the same. So if I agreed to pay you $100 biweekly, would you expect $10,400 by the end of a year or just a paltry $2600? That’s a staggering difference, isn’t it?? I just don’t get how this so often and so easily overlooked.

The same goes for the similarly infuriatingly vague “bimonthly” term that runs along those same illogical lines. When I say bimonthly, how do you know if I mean twice a month or every other month? There really is no true way to tell without using other phrases… and doesn’t that rather defeat the purpose of a word that is supposed to have a meaning that people understand? Can’t we assign only one definition to it or get rid of the word??! What if I said I’d meet you at noon, except noon meant either 6 in the morning or 10 at night? When would you show up?

So ultimately what did I decide to do for my conundrum at work? I used the term fortnightly.

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