Do you know what a fortnight is?

[baratron]

Huh. So, a web forum I go to has had an influx of clueless newbies, and as a result registration has been disabled for a fortnight. Cue lots of posts in the one forum that's open to guests asking what a fortnight is. Lots of speakers of American English claim they've never seen the term used, except in specifically British things like Monty Python. The rest of us are boggled. So here is a random poll to find out more.

[Poll #1046987]
Note that the "country" boxes are check boxes, enabling you to select multiple countries if, for example, you grew up in one country and now live somewhere else. I've separated out the US and Canada because I think Canadian English tends to be influenced by British English, but left Australia and New Zealand together because I simply don't know many people from either place. I'm not sure the poll is wonderfully comprehensive or offers all options, so feel free to continue in comments. A better way of asking about location might be to ask what flavour of English you think you speak (British, Irish, US American, etc), but I'm not sure whether people would find that easy to answer, or how many of us on the internet speak only one dialect.

I believe the people on my friends list are an unusually literate lot, so this is something of a biased sample. Feel free to link to the poll from your own journals to get a wider sample.

Comments

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

It's not never used here, but it isn't used here often. I'd fathom that more people know how many days are in a fortnight than how many miles are in a league, and a few more might know that it's a measurement of time. It's not used in casual conversation, it would be seen as perhaps affected, archaic, or pretentious to use it often.

Thinking about it, I'd also say that among what some folks call the mundane, it's less used, while I'd bet that most of my American f'list people would know what it means, and even use it without being pretentious, because they read a lot, and read a wide variety of stuff, and that sort of language has a way of seeping in.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

I just checked your user info to see if you were posting from Canada, because that's pretty much the answer I was going to give.

So Canada/California, similar knowledge & use of the word.

[cowboy-r.livejournal.com]

I answered the poll because mactavish dragged me over. ;)

I'm an American from the Southwest USA. (There are regional differences, after all). I've never heard anyone who wasn't me use the term in conversation, and have only heard it through exposure to British materials. On the other hand, I have an English degree, and am something of an Anglophile, so I deliberately expose myself to British materials, where others may not choose to.

A related question is, how many folks remember there was a time when "Se'night" was used instead of "week?"

[bdot.livejournal.com]

i was raised by an irish woman...so i grew up using it....made me sound silly in school tho

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

I got the impression that "fortnight" was not understood by the majority of Americans, but I have not tested this theory :-)

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

I notice that neither Chambers nor Mirriam Webster suggest that it is a chiefly British word. Maybe we are just witnessing the change of language through use or non use.

[treacle-well.livejournal.com]

Unlike mactavish I've never heard fortnight actually used in contemporary language or written materials (except perhaps for a deliberate sort of odd or old-fashioned or affected effect). It is commonly used in earlier American literature (for example, I have specific memories of its use in Little Women because quite possibly in reading it there is when I first had to work out what it meant), but I couldn't say at what point it ceased to be common in American English. So these days I mostly think of it as one of those British-English words that I have no trouble understanding but which I don't actually use myself.

[treacle-well.livejournal.com]

I missed a key word. Should say "Unlike mactavish I've never heard fortnight actually used in contemporary language or written materials in my day to day interactions with U.S. speakers or writing."

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

"used here": nobody actually uses it *here* in PA, but I use it all the time anyway because I'm not from around here.

[thekumquat.livejournal.com]

I can say that none of my American family (mainly from Michigan) will have ever uttered the word 'fortnight', and find it hilarious when I do so, although they've encountered it in UK writing and 'old-fashioned pretentious stuff'.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I'm more likely to say "two weeks" than "a fortnight", but I'll say both and expect to be understood. I've heard my father (a contractor) say that he was expecting delivery of $SOME_RANDOM_PIECE_OF_CONSTRUCTION_CRAP in "about a fortnight". To the foreman, and everybody understood. I mean, we sort of use it to be funny, but it's a perfectly cromulent word.

Boston, Massachusetts, United States.

I don't use the word often, but that's mainly because a time period of fourteen days isn't THAT common for me to be speaking about.

[skibbley.livejournal.com]

I would not expect fortnight to be widely understood outside UK, although some may know it from an interest in UK tv / radio.

[therealocelot.livejournal.com]

I admit - I wasn't entirely sure whether it was 10 days or 2 weeks until reading the comments, and that's close enough that it's hard to pick up from context. I think I may have been told it was 10 days at some point.

[thekumquat.livejournal.com]

10 working days.
I suspect shorter US vacation time might contribute to the linguistic difference - fewer people heading off for "a fortnight in the sun" as the ads put it.

[joedecker.livejournal.com]

It's a little unfair of me to say that "the term is used all the time here", it isn't in general conversational contexts. However, the term has a lot of awareness and some usage in the US geek community, in part because of it's tongue-in-cheek usage in the phraes furlongs per fortnight. (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=4pP&q=%22furlongs+per+fortnight%22&btnG=Search)

In general I would guess most Americans would hear usage of the word 'fortnight' in common conversation to be idiosyncratic, British, archaic and/or silly. Assuming they knew the word at all, that is.

[deyo.livejournal.com]

Andy and I made a system of measurement using fortnights, parsecs, and cords as the primary units.

Translating c(p/f)^2 into joules was a lot of fun. ;)

[joedecker.livejournal.com]

Weird--Google calculator doesn't seem to have "joule" in it's db.

[deyo.livejournal.com]

Are you starting with a unit of energy (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=5+ergs+in+joules&btnG=Google+Search) or a unit of power (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=5+watts+in+joules&btnG=Search)?

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

I really wanted a "sort of," option. I knew it was a duration of time and has some sort of gut sense for roughly how long it was but didn't know the precise duration without looking it up. I chose, "Yes, but it's not used in the part of the world where I live, I've only seen it on British TV/read it in books.", because everything after the, "Yes," applied and my answer seemed to me to be, "Yes-ish."

[platypus]

I picked the second option, but I don't think of the word as particularly British. I do think of it as archaic. People here don't use it unless they're being deliberately odd, going for humor, etc. I'm American, grew up in Wisconsin.

[bfly.livejournal.com]

What bothers me is not so much that people don't know what one is, but that they'd rather ask than just look it up. In less time than it takes to post a question like "What's a fortnight?" they could already have the answer instead of having it spoon-fed to them. (mactavish sent me to your poll.)

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Well, that's n00bs for you. Perhaps I should add that the site in question is a Pokemon site, run by adults for adults & older teens, but horribly beseiged by children.

Having said that, I have online friends who are 12-14 year olds. They're perfectly sensible human beings, and generally annoyed with all the immature/unthinking 12-14 y.o.s who give them a bad name.

I have students aged 17-18 who still expect me to do their thinking for them :/

[erik]

I suspect I am running with an odd crowd. Because people I know use it all the time, and people I don't know hardly ever do. (That is, I'll hardly ever hear it on the radio or from clients etc, but from friends, I hear it frequently. My friends are geeks and/or anglophiles.

certainly part of my everyday vocabulary

[redbird]

FSVO "here", meaning New York/books/a somewhat UK-skewed subset of sf fandom.

[rhialto.livejournal.com]

Dutch doesn't have a word for 2 weeks, but I'm pretty sure we were taught it in school.

I remember that the French expression is "une quinzaine (de jours)" which is "a fifteencount (of days)" (where I have to invent the word fifteencount because English copied only the word for a twelvecount (douze + aine = douzaine -> dozen) without taking the generalisation) even if it is about a period of 14 days.

See also microfortnight (http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/M/microfortnight.html).

[rhialto.livejournal.com]

Oh and attoparsec per microfortnight (http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/A/attoparsec.html).

[kiya]

Honestly, I have no idea where I picked up the word; it parses to me as 'completely normal rarely used vocabulary'.

[dmmaus.livejournal.com]

Australian. It's very common in everyday conversation here. Many people get paid their salaries fortnightly, and government pensions are paid fortnightly. I suspect most Australians would be astonished that many Americans don't know and use the word.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Often isn't really the right word.

Then again, I know lots of esoteric, exotic, archaic, or otherwise odd measurements, and use them.

Stone, ISO, hands, hectares, oz (as a means of describing leather) quire, etc.

I have strange hobbies.

TK

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Stone isn't esoteric or (terribly) archaic in the UK. Most people aged over, erm, 35 or so think of human weights in stone and pounds, rather than just pounds.

Personally, I was brought up on metric and have to mentally "translate" to the imperial system. It doesn't help that everything uses different base numbers.
12 inches = 1 foot, 3 feet = 1 yard, some big number of yards = 1 mile.
16 ounces = 1 pound, 14 pounds = 1 stone. (I think).
Then British pints are 20 fluid ounces, not 16 as in the US.

This means you have to remember 12, 16, 14 and 20 for different types of measurement. This is just Too Much for my brain to cope with, so I think entirely in metric where everything is in nice powers of 10. You can tell I'm a scientist, right?

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Stone is esoteric, in that it's idiosyncratic (being used in the UK, but only for limited function, primarily body weight)).

I can use metric, english, and american weights. I can also make sense of old pence.

If you want to get really esoteric with stone, there are/were local values for it. The Imperial Stone is 14 lbs, and has become "standard" but before that (and I am sure in local use) it ranged from 9 lbs (IIRC, in Kent) to 19 somewhere in the NW.

We can add Ton/Tonne/Metric Ton to the confusing similarities.

TK

[blueshimmer.livejournal.com]

I use it in writing all the time. I know what it is, and where it came from, and I know what a sennight is too. But it's not commonly used around here. Thus, I can't truthfully answer the first question above.