I would stick with fortnight. It is a good word for it’s purpose. For those who do not know the meaning dictionaries are readily available (looking up words is good, in my opinion). If it is not used in some territories let it be introduced or re-established. 
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How about expanding it out to ‘every two weeks’? Fortnight sounds like ‘jargon’ now!
Someone once said ‘in a blue moon’ and I was totally stumped .
with metta
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Hello @Mat,
How do we resolve Bhante’s @sujato’s problem :
with:
“limit of the life span, the seasons, the years, the months, the biweekly periods, the nights, the days, the meals, and the things that prevent them from eating”?
But then this is much simpler:
“limit of the life span, the seasons, the years, the months, the weeks, the nights, the days, the meals, and the things that prevent them from eating”
Unless there’s a deep need to have the month divided into fortnights, it would be good enough to indicate the sub-division.
Or are we over thinking here :D.
/\
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American here. I like fortnight just fine, but have never heard anyone use the word other than a friend from Birmingham (not Alabama). I know I looked it up sometime in my youth after encountering it in an English novel. It’s certainly not part of the USA vernacular. My wages are paid fortnightly, which is common here too, but we call it “every two weeks” or “biweekly.”
No reason to change the translations, I think. Having to run for a dictionary isn’t a bad thing. There are already many words in ancient Buddhist texts that require some research, like “dhamma,” which has exactly 1,348,422 meanings, by my count.
[quote=“AndyL, post:28, topic:5999”]
My wages are paid fortnightly, which is common here too, but we call it “every two weeks” or “biweekly.”
[/quote]Same in Canada.
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Where I grew up (in Indiana ) many people don’t know that the movements of the moon cause the tides. People have thought I was pulling their leg when I mentioned it. I cannot tell you how wrong I think it is to dumb down the language to some lowest common denominator - our ability to think clearly and to understand well depends on our having an appropriate vocabulary. For the most part, if we don’t have a word for it, then it doesn’t really exist for us. The moon periods are important in the EBTs and we have a perfect English word to signify them.
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[quote=“Suravira, post:30, topic:5999”]
Where I grew up (in Indiana ) many people don’t know that the movements of the moon cause the tides. People have thought I was pulling their leg when I mentioned it.
[/quote]This is the most frustrating thing about growing up in small rural towns! 
Try telling folks back home that the sky is blue because ozone is blue for a trial*, not because the sky reflects the sea and the sea reflects the sky in an endlessly regressing causeless chicken-and-egg dependent origination-type scenario that sometimes everyone seems to believe.
*see beneath for exposed hubris
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@sukha This is a target audience issue. I bet no one who will visit SC will not know what fortnight is, or be unable to Google it. They might recite patimokkha twice a week with ‘biweekly’ but I can’t see any harm in that. 
With metta
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Wait! I thought the sky was blue because blue light waves are shorter and get bounced around more entering the atmosphere.
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[quote=“Suravira, post:33, topic:5999, full:true”]
Wait! I thought the sky was blue because blue light waves are shorter and get bounced around more entering the atmosphere.
[/quote]Ozone is blue, which is one of the many factors that add to the sky’s colour.
I think at least. I might be wrong. But as I understand it, the atmosphere has the effect of splitting the light of the sun a little like a prism, but not nearly as linear and precisely as to form an exact “rainbow” due to scattering. Hence why at sunset, we move through the “rainbow” of the sun and arrive at red/orange/yellow light, which is a different form of scattering that we see at this time.
I could be wrong. I’ll try to find the video where I got this from to cite it in this post here.
EDIT: I swear I wasn’t making up that business about the prism and the “rainbow” of the sun. I still have to find that video: but here @ ~3:37: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yrZpTHBEss
Ozone may not be a factor at all. But it is blue (and pretty, I assume, though poisonous).
Whoever brought that up should be embarrassed. Glad I don’t post such foolish unsubstantiated assumptions that I have to later recant. 
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Well it’s nice to know that ozone is doing something beautiful up where it belongs instead of choking folks in cities on hot humid days.
Not to be a jerk, but I have to mention that this is but an urban myth. There was never a vote on an official language by the founding fathers, and English has always been the unofficial “official language” of the United States, even though the US does not have a statutory official language. See “Muhlenberg legend.”
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count me among the illiterate Americans. 
I have a vague idea that it might mean a week or a weekend, but I have no idea exactly what it is.
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I was wondering about the origin of the term fortnight, and of course Wikipedia was here when I needed it most:
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[quote=“sukha, post:39, topic:5999”]
fēowertyne
[/quote]I desperately want English to reclaim its lost macrons and diaereses.
I am sure we can all achieve this if we all cooöperate.
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This reminds of a funny encounter I had with a Buddhist friend. I was complaining about how Ven. T (Thanissaro) translates āsava. One of the words he uses is effluent, the other I can’t remember at the moment. But both words he uses I had to run to the dictionary to look them up.
So I say to my friend (acquaintance actually), “Who the heck knows what a damn effluent is? Only a soil engineer or someone like that .”
To which my friend responds, “As it happens, I know what effluents are, and yes I am a soil engineer.”
That was the first person I met who knew what an effluent is without having to look up the dictionary. (granted I haven’t asked a lot of people)
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I’ve known what a fortnight is since I started watching tennis, Wimbledon to be precise, when I was a preteen. (Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras were two of my sports heroes at the time) I was kind of an outlier, though, and did not share the same tastes as the typical youth of my age. While I think that the typical Sutta Central user had a broader scope of knowledge than the average American, (entirely on my own bias), I think that perhaps the term “payday” might work.
As in: “So mendicants, for a human being with a hundred years life span I have counted the life span, the limit of the life span, the seasons, the years, the months, the paydays , the nights, the days, the meals, and the things that prevent them from eating.”
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Bring back the thorn and ash! We could always use a couple more letters, though I don’t know where they fit in alphabetical order. I guess it would have to be A, Ash, Bee, Cee… Q, R, S, T, Thorn, U… There are two thorns, though, so maybe both would have to be listed.
Lol. See, the problem is, when this happens and you’re a monk.
Once i was talking a retreatant about her meditation. I’d only met her at the start of the retreat, and knew nothing about her. For some strange reason, when she mentioned an obstacle in meditation, I said, “well sometimes you’ve got to just jump in the ring and punch out those defilements.”
Now, anyone who knows how I teach meditation will know that I never, ever say this sort of thing. Maybe I’d just read a book by Ajahn Mahabua, who knows?
Anyway, she gave me the strangest look and said, “Umm, you know, I’m a boxer!”
I did not expect that![quote=“Timothy, post:42, topic:5999”]
the years, the months, the paydays
[/quote]
Excellent, that makes much better sense!
Thanks everyone for the help! I think in the end I’ll use “fortnight” if it’s a context that lists various periods of time; that way the meaning should be clear anyway. In other contexts, I’ll try to use “half a month” or “two weeks”, falling back to “fortnight” if nothing else works.
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I’m American and have read many books; lots of them before the internet arrived and still more after. I do know what a fortnight is and am surprised/not surprised that most Americans don’t know what a fortnight is.
I would encourage you to keep using the term so that it might not vanish from usage. In fact, make a point to use the term every fortnight or so, just to keep it fresh.
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