Tony,

On Tue, 19 Jun 2007 20:58:54 +1000, Tony Smith wrote:

> BTW, is fortnight just an Australian thing these days?

Certainly not - it's English!  :-)

> My recent co-workers, be they German, Korean, Russian, Estonian, Swedish,
> Indian or whatever have all looked at me blankly when I use fortnight.  What
> gives?

Well they're non-native English speakers, so obviously there are words that aren't taught in Business English, and perhaps fortnight doesn't have an 
equivalent in other languages?  We don't have a name for three weeks, for example - perhaps it's only English that has a name for two?

I've noticed a few phrases creeping into English-as-a-foreign-language which are not used by natives... the most common I've seen is "quite some" 
when talking of numbers of things, where we'd say "quite a lot" or "quite a few".  The latter is logical nonsense, but started out as ironic and 
nowadays either can be used interchangeably.  We use "quite some" when it has a scalar item attached, such as "quite some distance", "quite some 
weight", but not when it relates to numbers of things.

Cheers,


Howard Winter
St.Albans, England


-- 
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist