Mind your language
'I THOUGHT you said you were going to take it up and put tiles down,' said my husband annoyingly.
He was talking about the carpet in the downstairs lavatory, a sanctuary for a few wellingtons and useless umbrel- las. He was right, for it has got a bit pongy. It was because he was right that it was so annoying.
In much the same way, Pam and Stephen Walters of Spout Lane, Little Cornard, Suffolk, were slightly annoyed to be invited to subscribe to a magazine published 'bimonthly'. Did that, they wondered, mean twice a month or once every two months?
The dictionary was no help to them, though they noted the handy distinction between biannual (twice a year) and biennial (every two years). There must, the Walterses remark optimistically, be a better way.
I don't know. This is a rare case in which the Oxford English Dictionary gets prescriptive. Prescription has a poor reputation at the moment; lin- guists, so the idea goes, are meant to tell us what languages contain, not what they should be like. Every usage is regarded as equally 'valid'. That is all very well, as long as you do not mind your valid usage being misunderstood.
Anyway, in 1888 the section of the Oxford (or New as it was then) English Dictionary covering words beginning with bi- was published. It made a seem- ingly sensible plea. 'The ambiguous usage is confusing,' it said of bi-monthly, bi-weekly and so on, 'and might be avoid- ed by the use of semi-; e.g. semi-monthly, semi-weekly.' And in 1989, when the sec- ond edition of the OED was published, the sensible suggestion was retained. Nobody had taken the slightest notice in the intervening 101 years.
That is not, perhaps, entirely surpris- ing. After all, the meaning of semi- is less like the meaning of half, as in half yearly, than it is like the meaning of half in half-witted. It need not even be as arithmetically half as one part of a semi- detached house; it may be the qualita- tive description found in semi-conscious. So the OED's suggestion might not have been so bright after all. I have certainly never heard anyone say semi-monthly meaning 'twice a month'.
My suggestion for that particular meaning would be fortnightly, though how that would be regarded in America I do not know.
As a matter of fact, the black and white tiles are in a box in the cupboard under the stairs. If I take up the smelly carpet, it might encourage my husband to lay them. I shall report back.
Dot Wordsworth
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