Has anybody else noticed that gasoline prices at the pump have increased by about 25% in less than a month? You would expect some sort of media attention to this, since it affects everybody. Anticipation of increased demand for Memorial Weekend would be a suspect, but this started a little too early. It could be that this is caused by the biannual re-tooling at refineries to shift some of their processing from heating oil (winter product) to more gasoline (more in demand during summer). I can't say for sure, though, because exactly zero journalists in the major media outlets have addressed this.
This brings me to my second topic: the word "biannual" means twice every year, as I just used it. EXCEPT when it doesn't, and instead means once every two years. Wait, you mean the same word, in the same context, can have a meaning that cannot necessarily be distinguished from the other meaning based strictly by the surrounding words? Exactly right. www.m-w.com and www.dictionary.com both allow this crap to propagate through our English language. I know it's cobbled together, and very difficult to learn, but it's the language that we've got, and is the language of business, engineering, and commerce! Who are the gatekeepers of dictionaries, and why can't the definition of biannual be changed to "BIANNUAL, adjective, declared obsolete in 2009. See instead biennial or semiannual"?
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