A comic strip I follow online used the word “fortnight” today.
It’s an odd word, “fortnight,” at least for an American. It means “two weeks,” of course. But we rarely use it over here because—let’s face it—it doesn’t take any less time or effort to say than “two weeks.”
Pragmatic people, we Yanks.
I can see the use of the word in situations where one is paid every two weeks, as so many of us are, though. It would be kind of cool to say, “I get paid fortnightly.” That saves a couple syllables off “I get paid every two weeks.”
But that can’t be the original reason the English use it. The word itself is very old, going back to times before anybody got a regular salary. Perhaps serfs in Olde England got their ration of lard fortnightly, or something.
Still, the word brings back one personal memory. The sort of thing that means nothing to anybody else in the world, but to me alone.
In the misty past, when I was but a callow lad, giveaway calendars were far more common than they are today. Nobody ever thought of having a store in the mall (malls did exist, even then) around Christmas to sell calendars, because everybody got all the calendars they needed from the grocery store, and the hardware store, and the drug store, and there was often a pile in church (Free! Take One!) supplied by the local mortuary. (I have a mortuary calendar for 2011, which I picked up in church this year. A blast from the past. Hadn’t seen that in years.)
Anyway, I remember one calendar my folks got somewhere one year around 1960. I think it may have come from a drugstore, but I’m probably wrong. It was a “Fortnight Calendar.” I’d never seen one of those before, and I’ve never seen one since. You turned the page every two weeks. We hung it in the “sun porch,” an enclosed porch with a lot of windows, where Dad kept his desk.
The fact that the calendar was laid out in a fortnight format wasn’t the only unusual thing about it. It also contained information. Every square had a notation of some historical event that had happened on that day. There were also little notes in the empty squares, containing obscure, random information.
I loved that calendar.
It was not replaced the following year. If my folks got a calendar from the same business, it was some different kind. People probably complained that they’d rather have something with a pretty picture.
Me, I never found anything to read that was as interesting to me as that calendar, until I finally got on the internet.
Now I think about it, though, I’m not entirely sure the fortnight calendar and the random information calendar were the same calendar at all. I may be conflating two memories.
“Conflating.” Also a word I’m fond of.
Physicists sometimes, with tongue in cheek, use “furlongs per fortnight” to measure certain rather slow velocities.
Actually, I guess it’s computer scientists. See this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFF_system
In other words, Furlongs per Fortnight is way to fast to measure the rate of change in a small country church.
Heh.
But, but … what was the comic strip?
I’m a calendar junkie, and for the first time EVER, I had to buy a calendar this year. I usually get four or five free ones, and use them all. This year: nada.
I would love a “fortnight” calendar. When I lived near a Randalls grocery store (in the Houston TX area), they would start handing out new calendars in August—for Rosh Hashanah, and those calendars had the most beautiful photographs ever of Israel.
Pearls Before Swine
Cool. I didn’t even know you could embed in Comments.
Lars, YOU had malls AND a sun-porch?????
Gosh! Minnesota must have been a really up and coming state back then. We farm folk in Iowa sure didn’t enjoy malls until maybe sometime in the ’70s…in the big cities, like Des Moines.
And a sun-porch! Wow!! That would have been the cat’s pajamas!!!!
I do recall some banks giving out metal calenders.
Some big, some small for your desk.
You are right though… I sure did like the info on those big squares for each day…
BUT, alas… no fortnighters……………..
The first indoor mall was Southdale in Minneapolis, built in the 1960s. And we had a Miracle Mile strip mall in Rochester.
“Conflate’ is wonderful. “Confabulate” is wonderfuller. 😛
Furlongs per fortnight makes me think of my father’s proposal for a volume unit called barn-lightyears, inspired by the area of the broad side of a barn. It would be a very long, narrow volume.
sigh!….. gosh….. I guess Minn. just about has everything nice………. and even in the ’60s!!!
Who would have guessed????
As a teen in the 1950’s, I attended dinner dances called, “Fortnightlys”. That was part of our young world––and how we did look forward to those evenings. Very quaint; but those days are fond memories.
“…dinner dances…” “Fortnightlys” Wow! Just the words sound so nice to me. These are such visual words to me.
I could see Lars writing a short story based just on those three words.
Back home in Iowa at the same time, young folks had none of this. Adults with money went to the local country club and had dinner dances, often with lots of “lubrication”. However, I do not get the same nice, romantic visions as when you wrote them, Katherine.