Every other month should be "semi-monthly", shouldn't it?
'Hell Bound'
Natter 68: Bork Bork Bork
Off-topic discussion. Wanna talk about corsets, duct tape, or physics? This is the place. Detailed discussion of any current-season TV must be whitefonted.
Twice a month should be semi-monthly. Every two months should be bimonthly.
I have only understood it to mean every two months. It's very confusing if it means both.
Or, what -t said!
Why does it mean both?
As I understand it, it's for the same reason we have flammable and inflammable. Its original meaning was "every two months," but people kept using it as meaning twice a month, and the powers that be gave up.
Signed,
My twice-weekly college newspaper was semiweekly, not biweekly
Someone explained to me the difference between flammable and inflammable once, and it made perfect sense, but then I forgot it.
It's possible that was a dream.
ita ! I've been doing the stairs at work, too. I started out only going down. Then I slowly started adding going up a floor at a time (I park on the third level and work on the seventh floor.) I've been going down every evening for a while and then I slowly started going up a floor at a time, week by week. I can make it 3-1/2 to the full four floors now every morning. I started doing that about a month and a half ago. Today, I only made it up two floors in the morning (the humidity was something fierce and the stairwells aren't air conditioned), but I went out for lunch with seven floors down and four floors up, so I feel I made up for my early morning wimpiness. I think it's a great way to build cardio endurance.
Someone explained to me the difference between flammable and inflammable once, a
They both mean "this shit will burn." The original word was inflammable, from the Latin for "to set fire to." People kept thinking the "in" meant "not," so people labeling dangerous things went with "flammable."
Semi means half. A semicircle is half of a circle. A semiannual publication comes out twice a year. Semimonthly means twice a month.
Bi- is always unclear and is best avoided because it just means "two", without indicating if you're halving or doubling.
This is why I don't buy the argument that we should accept definitions "everyone" uses, even when they're, wrong, wrong, wrong.