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.
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