A few words while my stained glass cement dries. . .

The other day I was reading a description of a newsletter we publish at work. It said the newsletter was published bimonthly. There was a time when my mind was certain what that meant. I was certain of a lot of things at one time. Now I’m not so sure. Anyway, I looked it up in two dictionaries, and they both give the same basic story. There turns out to be a real problem with the meaning of the word ‘bimonthly.’ The first dictionary said it means happening every two months. That’s the first meaning. The second meaning is . . . happening twice a month! The second dictionary gives both meanings as well, but it says that happening twice a month is nonstandard. Either way, although those two meanings are not exactly antonyms, they’re close. Essentially the word is useless. What is a customer to understand when we say bimonthly? What if they’re non-standard customers? Semimonthly has more meaning to my mind. ‘Semi’ means less than whole. I think of semi-sweet chocolate, which is less sweet than sweet chocolate. So semi-monthly should mean less than monthly, or every other month. If we all understood semimonthly correctly, we should all understand bimonthly correctly. But we don’t, so bimonthly is no longer useful.

Today I came across the question “Who do I contact?” and I wondered if I should change this to “Whom do I contact?” Isn’t the latter correct? But people don’t say that.

Note to self: Egon Schiele. Remember that name.