this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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There is no such thing as a Stupid Question!
Don't be embarrassed of your curiosity; everyone has questions that they may feel uncomfortable asking certain people, so this place gives you a nice area not to be judged about asking it. Everyone here is willing to help.
- ex. How do I change oil
- ex. How to tie shoes
- ex. Can you cry underwater?
Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca still apply!
Thanks for reading all of this, even if you didn't read all of this, and your eye started somewhere else, have a watermelon slice ๐.
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There was often much confusion about this in the past because as you said it can mean multiple things. We seem to have gone away from any proper etymological use of the word 'bi' and have defined (for the most part) biweekly to be every two weeks, bimonthly to be twice a month, biannually to be twice a year (that one maybe not). Legal documents that I see don't use those terms to avoid confusion.
Frustratingly, "biannual" can also mean twice a year or every two years. Fortunately there is the "biennial" which unambiguously means every two years.
Bicentennial is also every 50 years.
Are you sure about that? I'm from Canada and distinctly remember the travel ads urging us to head on down to participate in the bicentennial celebrations, meant to celebrate the second century of that country's founding.
Well shit, I stand corrected.
Language is a wonderful chaos. You're just on the leading edge of change! :)
One of the 'trivia' things on the display in our elevator was about how Websters had a listing for 5 years that wasn't actually a word, 'dord'. Like come on, now you can't even trust words in the dictionary?!