Jeanette (of Polyglot brain and inclination) should read:

>> 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?

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

> Certainly not - it's English!  :-)

Also antipodean ***.
It's also alive and well across the pond (here in New Zealand).

An interesting date related term which not too many people use, and 
which some people get wrong when they do, is "xxx week" meaning the 
occurrence of xxx which occurs in the week after this one. eg if today 
is Tuesday the 10th (which it isn't) "Wednesday week"  would be 
Wednesday the 18th, 8 days hence. One can also use "xxx fortnight". eg 
Thursday fortnight from the above would be Thursday the 19th. This 
usage is probably intended to prevent having to say "the Thursday 
after next" on Tuesday the 10th when referring to Thursday the 19th. 
Even the phrase "The Thursday after next" is liable to riong foreign 
to foreign ears as it is a contraction of "the Thursday after next 
Thursday" with the second Thursday implied.

My well educated and intelligent wife recently, on a Tuesday, said 
"next Thursday ..." when she in fact meant Thursday week. For reasons 
which did and do escape me she took exception to my failure to 
correctly comprehend which date she was actually referring to.

I can't complain - the late list member Peter Crowcroft reported his 
wife having turned round with a loaded pistol pointed horizontally 
after it jammed while target shooting. She realised what she had done 
immediately and could not subsequently account for having done 
something so lethally dangerous which she had had drilled into her as 
an utter no no*. She still suffered the resultant compulsory eviction 
from the shooting club as a consequence. Compared to that, turning up 
at an event a week early when MY wife has brain fade would be a truly 
minor matter :-)




            Russell

*  no no = another Englishlanguageism of obvious meaning for the 
ESOL**  amongst us to excercise their brains with.

** ESOL    = English as Second or Other Language. (The official term 
used here at least for English language courses for people whose 
native tongue is not English (nor NZlandish).

***    While everyone has antipodes and most of them aren't here, we 
claim the label as a geographic descriptive by dint of historical 
usage. While the antipodes of NZ is/are in fact Spain, the term is, 
for us, used with respect of Mother England.

The antipodes of Australia is the Bermuda Triangle (get out yer world 
globe and check, Cobber). Go figure. :-)





> 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

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