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

[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