The Critical Path: It’s Good to Be King →
You really should be listening to Horace Dediu’s biweekly1 podcast with Dan Benjamin.
In this episode from a few weeks ago, Horace explains in the most sensible, informed way I’ve heard yet why Apple can’t easily spend a meaningful chunk of its giant pile of cash.
He’s not just a blogger talking out of his ass like most of us (myself included). He actually knows about this stuff.
It’s especially relevant now, since the “Apple needs to get rid of some of this cash” calls have resumed in full force after this week’s quarterly earnings release.
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By convention, “biweekly” should mean “every two weeks”. Unfortunately, the bi- suffix has been misunderstood so frequently to mean “twice per” instead of “every two” that “biweekly” now uselessly means “every two weeks” or “twice per week”.
The semi- prefix properly, and only, means “twice per”. Therefore, the correct word for “twice per week” is “semiweekly”. But since misunderstandings of this have ruined bi-, there’s now no English word2 that unambiguously means “every two weeks”.
I’m using “biweekly” to properly mean “every two weeks” in protest of this widespread definition-shifting vocabularly ignorance. ↩︎
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Except “fortnightly”, which is ridiculous. ↩︎