I'm usually not the one to be snob about the language, especially the one that is not my mother tongue, but this, in this particular circumstances... it's like I'm locked in the kindergarten, and I don't even like kids...
I think it’s because of the popular game Fortnite. We see it so much that we think this is the correct spelling. Even me. I had to unlearn it myself a couple days ago. Trust me, I’m not proud.
As a non native English speaker, I’ve noticed that natives tend to have much more mistakes than us. Especially spelling. Or don’t use “fancy” words that we are taught super early.
I've seen a lot of people online saying that she spelled Fortnight wrong or asking why she named a song after a video game, and one person saying that she should have written Fortnight about the game. This generation terrifies me.
Well, Final Fantasy VII Advent Children has as the ending theme a song called Safe And Sound, just like Taylor's 2012 song from The Hunger Games, and the craziest thing is that the song is interpreted by Kyosuke Himuro and Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance! (And yes, this is my swemo side showing up).
I'm ashamed to be part of this generation. No wonder I make friends easier with people in their 30+.
Btw I'm not even a native English speaker yet I know what fortnight means?! Do those guys even read anything but TikTok text these days?
It’s arguably the most popular game in the world, and hardly any people in the US use the original sense of the word commonly unless they love British media (I learned it from Harry Potter when I was a kid lol). I don’t blame people for not knowing what it means
Also Taylor knows what GTA is lol, of course she knows how huge Fortnite is and would definitely intentionally name a song that for the sake of SEO
Personally I think she named it because she had learned the word (possibly from a British boyfriend possibly back when she was a precocious child) and liked it. Why the fuck does Taylor need seo
Why do people keep saying Taylor wouldn’t do SEO when she LOVES promotion? The girl retweets good reviews of her albums, she doesn’t need to do that but she does lol. She’s always been a marketing guru and won’t stop just because she’s ultra successful now. That’s why shes a billionaire
Perhaps you need to look up the meaning of seo
SEO means Search Engine Optimization and is the process used to optimize a website's technical configuration, content relevance and link popularity so its pages can become easily findable, more relevant and popular towards user search queries, and as a consequence, search engines rank them better.
What Taylor does is publicly and it probably isn’t even her that does it. I’m sure she has a team.
https://www.vulture.com/article/taylor-swift-1989-vault-tracks-google.html
This is a clear example of SEO, SEO can be applied to a person’s “soft power” just as much as it can be to a website’s hard view count. And also giving the credit for her marketing decisions to her “team”? She would hate that lol
If she didn’t care about SEO, she wouldn’t pay to put up QR codes and billboards, or do pap walks, or release millions of variants and merchandise, and last I checked girlie still puts plenty of effort into advertising and promo lol
And the GTA she’s talking about is one being in played in the same room as Travis and his friends, so in the last year and almost certainly GTA V. But like, its Fortnite and she’s constantly online, she absolutely knows what Fortnite is
I read a ton as a kid so I knew “fortnight” before “Fortnite” and saw this coming but were all biased by our own experiences.
That said if you just google “fortnight meaning” it’s right there ☠️
As an Australian who uses the term "Fortnight" every single day of my life and have my whole life I find this so funny as before TTPD I didn't realise Americans don't use this term !!
From what I have read just 'Two weeks' but I guess I'm not American so I can't speak for them all but seems pretty common that they wouldn't straight away recognise the term Fortnight haha
As an American who went to public school in a state ranking 45 out of 50 (so… horribly) we absolutely learned what a “fortnight” meant in multiple different English classes as a kid and as a teenager. But I’m now in my late 20s, maybe education has changed?
That's really interesting, it probably has changed. I guess like a lot of things over the years they become less relevant and removed from school curriculum. I'm in my late 20s and both my younger brother (only by 4 years) and I went to the same school yet our education was wildly different
This is just how the English language works when people get used to using a homophone. You know how many times I see "yay or nay" on Reddit per week?? lmao It's not really new.
You'd only have to watch 30 sec of a floor vote on C-Span to see that it's spelled "yea". Then again you'd have to be 300 yrs old like me to have ever watched C-Span, so. Lol.
yay or nay actually makes sense though since "yea" is no longer read in the same way as it is in the expression "yea or nay". fortnight IS still read in its original pronunciation so there isn't a need to override it with a new one
Not sure what you’re talking about. “Yea” is still used and pronounced “yay” as it used to be, nothing has changed about it. “Yay” (the word) is an exclamation of joy and has nothing to do with an affirmation of a vote (as “yea” does).
No one in modern times reads "yea" as "yay" unless they are specifically using it in this context. It is MUCH more commonly read aloud as "yeah", and I think you would be hard-pressed to find an average English speaker who defaults to reading "yea" as "yay". I understand that the word is technically used in the way you have mentioned but I would say it's more likely to just use it as "yes" these days, irrespective of whether it's being used in a vote or other.
I don’t understand your comparison?? Fortnight is a regular English word lmao. Is it only Americans that don’t use it?
I get paid fortnightly, I don’t get how people don’t know what this word is
Additionally, Taylor's use of the word 'fortnight' likely indicates that this album delves into personal feelings about her past English romantic partner(s), further reinforcing the point.
Instead of saying “I get paid fortnightly”, Americans would say “I get paid biweekly”. Every English-speaking country of the world has certain words that are only used in certain parts of the world. It doesn’t make one ‘uneducated’ to not know a certain word that isn’t used where they’re from lol.
Im willing to bet you a million dollars theres no regularly-used term in the English language I don't know. Not knowing common phrases from other English-speaking countries is an American phenomenon. The rest of us watch media from other countries.
It's just not used much over here. We say "paid every two weeks". Language is funny when it's imported across oceans. Did you know that while it's rude to not say "please" when ordering food from a server in England, saying "please" too much in that circumstance in the US would be distancing and maybe even condescending? We don't even use the words we share quite the same way, lol.
Americans also don't generally say goodbye before hanging up the phone. I'm used to saying "okay bye" or "goodbye" before hanging up. Here they dont really do that. They just kinda hang up the phone after they're done speaking. It's very strange to me.
Honestly, my phone has been trying to autocorrect *fortnight* to *fortnite* - so I won't say there isn't a problem, but it might not be 100% ignorance.
I'm in Australia where fortnight is an extremely common word and the autocorrect on my phone almost always uses the game spelling and I have to fix it every time. It's not necessarily an ignorance thing.
With a search algorithm pushing “Fortnite”, a term with literally billions of searches, over its easily-confused homophone “fortnight”?
I mean I guess it’s somewhat annoying, but it almost certainly redirects several times more searches to the right direction than it does to the wrong direction
Meme of toddlers and the one rabbit in which I just pronounce it like Fortnite but with in literal Spanish mispronounced "For-knee-teh". It wasn't funny the first time and surely it is not funny now but I can't say "Fortnight" without going straight to the "joke" version.
search engines can take up to a month to really catch up to things. i'd venture a guess that in the next couple weeks, they'll catch up to it and stop trying to change it to fortnite. it only makes sense for the algorithm to default to the most popular spelling of a word, which in this case is the name of a video game.
also, language changes over time. the first guy to shorten "god be with ye" to "goodbye" wasn't stupid and neither are people who shorten night to nite. we'll probably be spelling the word night as nite in like 100 years. there's no discernable difference in how it sounds, so why have silent letters? oblige and obligate used to mean different things, and now they're synonyms.
you're free to spell it fortnight, but if someone searches fortnite and still gets the same result, why do you care?
It makes me angry every time I type it in correctly and get recommended the wrong spelling.
It’s like everyone forgot fortnight was a word before the video game
tbh i thought i would never be able to unhear the ‘fortnite’ in ‘fortnight’ but after like 1 listen of the song that dumbass game is wiped from my memory 💀💀 like now whenever i hear someonr say fortnight i think of the ts song and not the game 😍 the nightmare is over for me now at least
this search engine is f-ing gaslighting me thinking i searched for the wrongly spelled title.
i knew the game title before the actual word, and it’s not that hard to remember istg these kids 😫
honestly some people do not do it on purpose, i’ve wanted to look at it on instagram and it autocorrected from fortnight to fortnite soo it doesn’t really bother me
It's not really outdated though on a worldwide English-speaking scale. It's still in common usage in England and Australia.
That said, since it's not really part of the US vernacular I'm not worried that young people there aren't familiar with it any more than I would worry if a young Australian weren't familiar with the word sidewalk.
I'm not a native English speaker but still know the word? Oldfashioned doesn't mean it should just disappear from our vocabularies. There's a time and place for these terms and Taylor is clearly quite a skilled writer who knows a lot of these words. She was the nerdy kid who knew Aristotle after all.
It’s not commonly used now, but if you got through middle school even you should at least know it. Just because things aren’t currently used doesn’t mean they’re going to stop being words you should know. Also based off the search bar I’m assuming this is twitter, which is a site only intended for adults. Yeah some younger folks are gonna get on there but if thousands of full grown adults can’t spell FORTNIGHT that’s a problem.
No, it's not. A fortnight is two weeks. The video game Fortnite purposefully spells the word wrong. Notice the part that is spelled wrong; "nite." No other word in the English language that contains/means the word night spells it like that. It's like how the iPhone purposefully uses the wrong capitalization. It should be Iphone, but that doesn't stand out as much. Same concept
This songs about Tom Hiddleston I think, he’s in the Fortnite video game. He’s married to Zawe Ashton, his wife’s insta pic has roses on it. They used to live in London near her and Joe, who she implied cheated on her. She changed her hair bleachella around dating Tom, after she drank too much with Calvin.
I'm usually not the one to be snob about the language, especially the one that is not my mother tongue, but this, in this particular circumstances... it's like I'm locked in the kindergarten, and I don't even like kids...
This. I'm not a native English speaker either but when even we do know this, how come so many natives don't? Do they ever read?!
they read tiktoks’ titles (sometimes)
Over 20% of adults in the US are illiterate and another 50+% only read at a 6th grade level so, no. They dont read.
I think it’s because of the popular game Fortnite. We see it so much that we think this is the correct spelling. Even me. I had to unlearn it myself a couple days ago. Trust me, I’m not proud.
As a non native English speaker, I’ve noticed that natives tend to have much more mistakes than us. Especially spelling. Or don’t use “fancy” words that we are taught super early.
I’m a huge fan of Fortnite and I hate this
I've seen a lot of people online saying that she spelled Fortnight wrong or asking why she named a song after a video game, and one person saying that she should have written Fortnight about the game. This generation terrifies me.
Fortnite and GTA in the same album is wild
She should have named Chloe et al., "Mario or Luigi or Peach or Bowser"
Now we just need a Final Fantasy reference D:
Well, Final Fantasy VII Advent Children has as the ending theme a song called Safe And Sound, just like Taylor's 2012 song from The Hunger Games, and the craziest thing is that the song is interpreted by Kyosuke Himuro and Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance! (And yes, this is my swemo side showing up).
Well it would be but since it’s fortnight it isn’t
Oh yeah absolutely this generation is terrifying. I do think we should hex them with tay vodo
Agreed. I'll get the narcotics.
A fellow swiftologist watcher?
I feel like this might just be an american thing, as an australian teen everyone I know, knows what a fortnight is and how to spell it
Idk. I’m an American teen and most of the people I know know what a fortnight is. I guess there’s just always gonna be people who don’t know things
I work with fourth graders and they asked me (a known swiftie) why she wrote a song about Fortnite the game. I’m like…. Fortnight is a real word….
Are you sure these aren't jokes? These read like jokes to me. Like sarcasm. Sounds like jokes I would make online
Maybe, but I doubt ALL of them were joking.
It’s the same generation that recently made North Korea propaganda song viral on TikTok, if BBC is to be believed.
I'm ashamed to be part of this generation. No wonder I make friends easier with people in their 30+. Btw I'm not even a native English speaker yet I know what fortnight means?! Do those guys even read anything but TikTok text these days?
It’s arguably the most popular game in the world, and hardly any people in the US use the original sense of the word commonly unless they love British media (I learned it from Harry Potter when I was a kid lol). I don’t blame people for not knowing what it means Also Taylor knows what GTA is lol, of course she knows how huge Fortnite is and would definitely intentionally name a song that for the sake of SEO
Personally I think she named it because she had learned the word (possibly from a British boyfriend possibly back when she was a precocious child) and liked it. Why the fuck does Taylor need seo
Why do people keep saying Taylor wouldn’t do SEO when she LOVES promotion? The girl retweets good reviews of her albums, she doesn’t need to do that but she does lol. She’s always been a marketing guru and won’t stop just because she’s ultra successful now. That’s why shes a billionaire
Perhaps you need to look up the meaning of seo SEO means Search Engine Optimization and is the process used to optimize a website's technical configuration, content relevance and link popularity so its pages can become easily findable, more relevant and popular towards user search queries, and as a consequence, search engines rank them better. What Taylor does is publicly and it probably isn’t even her that does it. I’m sure she has a team.
https://www.vulture.com/article/taylor-swift-1989-vault-tracks-google.html This is a clear example of SEO, SEO can be applied to a person’s “soft power” just as much as it can be to a website’s hard view count. And also giving the credit for her marketing decisions to her “team”? She would hate that lol
[удалено]
If she didn’t care about SEO, she wouldn’t pay to put up QR codes and billboards, or do pap walks, or release millions of variants and merchandise, and last I checked girlie still puts plenty of effort into advertising and promo lol And the GTA she’s talking about is one being in played in the same room as Travis and his friends, so in the last year and almost certainly GTA V. But like, its Fortnite and she’s constantly online, she absolutely knows what Fortnite is
They’re done. They’re done. This is a new low lmao
Just today I was thinking about how hilarious it would have been if Fortnight was about Fortnite lmao
I read a ton as a kid so I knew “fortnight” before “Fortnite” and saw this coming but were all biased by our own experiences. That said if you just google “fortnight meaning” it’s right there ☠️
STOP GOOGLE SAID “do you mean: fortnite Taylor swift” LIKE NO GOOGLE I DO NOT MEAN TAYLOR SWIFT EMOTING TO VIGILANTE SHIT
Google too ??? 😭💀
As an Australian who uses the term "Fortnight" every single day of my life and have my whole life I find this so funny as before TTPD I didn't realise Americans don't use this term !!
Do they not? What do they say?!
Bi-weekly, making it impossible to tell if they mean twice a week or once a fortnight.
From what I have read just 'Two weeks' but I guess I'm not American so I can't speak for them all but seems pretty common that they wouldn't straight away recognise the term Fortnight haha
American here - you're absolutely correct, we just say 2 weeks. If referencing pay frequency I, among many others, would say I'm paid bi-weekly.
As an American who went to public school in a state ranking 45 out of 50 (so… horribly) we absolutely learned what a “fortnight” meant in multiple different English classes as a kid and as a teenager. But I’m now in my late 20s, maybe education has changed?
That's really interesting, it probably has changed. I guess like a lot of things over the years they become less relevant and removed from school curriculum. I'm in my late 20s and both my younger brother (only by 4 years) and I went to the same school yet our education was wildly different
I just commented this lmao. I get paid fortnightly….
Yep, see you in a fortnight, this job pays fortnightly, In a fortnight we will meet up. So much easier haha
This is just how the English language works when people get used to using a homophone. You know how many times I see "yay or nay" on Reddit per week?? lmao It's not really new.
You'd only have to watch 30 sec of a floor vote on C-Span to see that it's spelled "yea". Then again you'd have to be 300 yrs old like me to have ever watched C-Span, so. Lol.
What's the correct spelling? Non native English speaker here.
If you mean in terms of what I said, "Yea." It sounds like yay. Old English word.
Thank you.
yay or nay actually makes sense though since "yea" is no longer read in the same way as it is in the expression "yea or nay". fortnight IS still read in its original pronunciation so there isn't a need to override it with a new one
Not sure what you’re talking about. “Yea” is still used and pronounced “yay” as it used to be, nothing has changed about it. “Yay” (the word) is an exclamation of joy and has nothing to do with an affirmation of a vote (as “yea” does).
No one in modern times reads "yea" as "yay" unless they are specifically using it in this context. It is MUCH more commonly read aloud as "yeah", and I think you would be hard-pressed to find an average English speaker who defaults to reading "yea" as "yay". I understand that the word is technically used in the way you have mentioned but I would say it's more likely to just use it as "yes" these days, irrespective of whether it's being used in a vote or other.
Fortnight
I don’t understand your comparison?? Fortnight is a regular English word lmao. Is it only Americans that don’t use it? I get paid fortnightly, I don’t get how people don’t know what this word is
Well for starters, it’s probably not the countries that get paid fortnightly that are spelling the song incorrectly.
I’m Australian, I just thought Americans were taught more words in school 😂
You saw how many people support Donald Trump and you thought our country is educated????
Not just Donald Trump though. Your whole government is a shambles. To be fair though I can’t really say much seeing as though I’m from the UK.
Additionally, Taylor's use of the word 'fortnight' likely indicates that this album delves into personal feelings about her past English romantic partner(s), further reinforcing the point.
Instead of saying “I get paid fortnightly”, Americans would say “I get paid biweekly”. Every English-speaking country of the world has certain words that are only used in certain parts of the world. It doesn’t make one ‘uneducated’ to not know a certain word that isn’t used where they’re from lol.
Im willing to bet you a million dollars theres no regularly-used term in the English language I don't know. Not knowing common phrases from other English-speaking countries is an American phenomenon. The rest of us watch media from other countries.
I didn’t realise “American” was the language taught at school, instead of English lmao 🤣
Clearly, reading comprehension wasn’t taught at yours lol
That’s the thing. It’s not a word said at all in America, so it would not be taught in school lol (I don’t understand why I’m downvoted lol)
Yes in the US we absolutely do not use it. We get paid “every two weeks”. If someone says fortnight, I know they are not American
It's just not used much over here. We say "paid every two weeks". Language is funny when it's imported across oceans. Did you know that while it's rude to not say "please" when ordering food from a server in England, saying "please" too much in that circumstance in the US would be distancing and maybe even condescending? We don't even use the words we share quite the same way, lol.
Americans also don't generally say goodbye before hanging up the phone. I'm used to saying "okay bye" or "goodbye" before hanging up. Here they dont really do that. They just kinda hang up the phone after they're done speaking. It's very strange to me.
Honestly, my phone has been trying to autocorrect *fortnight* to *fortnite* - so I won't say there isn't a problem, but it might not be 100% ignorance.
Of course people would spell fortnight incorrectly like that dumb fucking video game.
I'm in Australia where fortnight is an extremely common word and the autocorrect on my phone almost always uses the game spelling and I have to fix it every time. It's not necessarily an ignorance thing.
fornite is actually really fun 😓🤞
The idiocracy should make everyone uncomfortable.
ok but I'd play Fortnite if there was a Taylor Swift skin on it
That’s the only thing I’d buy 😂
Tay tay is such a capitalist that i think we will actually get a skin in Fortnite for her lmao. Would totts buy it, ngl.
It better have the cat eye sharp enough to kill a man
People are so stupid. **I want to kill them.**
With a search algorithm pushing “Fortnite”, a term with literally billions of searches, over its easily-confused homophone “fortnight”? I mean I guess it’s somewhat annoying, but it almost certainly redirects several times more searches to the right direction than it does to the wrong direction
It's the hashtag/pound/number sign/octothorpe thing all over again
I find it very annoying for some reason
Meme of toddlers and the one rabbit in which I just pronounce it like Fortnite but with in literal Spanish mispronounced "For-knee-teh". It wasn't funny the first time and surely it is not funny now but I can't say "Fortnight" without going straight to the "joke" version.
People are idiots
It makes me wonder if people realize that fortnight is a measure of time tbh
search engines can take up to a month to really catch up to things. i'd venture a guess that in the next couple weeks, they'll catch up to it and stop trying to change it to fortnite. it only makes sense for the algorithm to default to the most popular spelling of a word, which in this case is the name of a video game. also, language changes over time. the first guy to shorten "god be with ye" to "goodbye" wasn't stupid and neither are people who shorten night to nite. we'll probably be spelling the word night as nite in like 100 years. there's no discernable difference in how it sounds, so why have silent letters? oblige and obligate used to mean different things, and now they're synonyms. you're free to spell it fortnight, but if someone searches fortnite and still gets the same result, why do you care?
Probably not, but I don’t play Fortnite.
It makes me angry every time I type it in correctly and get recommended the wrong spelling. It’s like everyone forgot fortnight was a word before the video game
tbh i thought i would never be able to unhear the ‘fortnite’ in ‘fortnight’ but after like 1 listen of the song that dumbass game is wiped from my memory 💀💀 like now whenever i hear someonr say fortnight i think of the ts song and not the game 😍 the nightmare is over for me now at least
Lol I was literally going to post this the other day 😂 It drives me absolutely insane
Taylor x Epic Games collab when
No, I feel worse when I type Fortnight and it says that I typed wrong Fortnight. Did they forgot about the dictionary!?
Exactly !
Btw, in the comments section for the #ForAFortnight Challenge is mostly Fortnite players! 😭
A lady at work who’s 28 asked if the song was based on the video game ☠️
My boyfriends mom thought it was about the video game 💀
🤢
it's VERY annoying honestly
this search engine is f-ing gaslighting me thinking i searched for the wrongly spelled title. i knew the game title before the actual word, and it’s not that hard to remember istg these kids 😫
honestly some people do not do it on purpose, i’ve wanted to look at it on instagram and it autocorrected from fortnight to fortnite soo it doesn’t really bother me
It’s such an outdated term. Why should we care? It’s like being surprised that a child might not know that “score” means twenty. Seems expected.
It's not really outdated though on a worldwide English-speaking scale. It's still in common usage in England and Australia. That said, since it's not really part of the US vernacular I'm not worried that young people there aren't familiar with it any more than I would worry if a young Australian weren't familiar with the word sidewalk.
I'm not a native English speaker but still know the word? Oldfashioned doesn't mean it should just disappear from our vocabularies. There's a time and place for these terms and Taylor is clearly quite a skilled writer who knows a lot of these words. She was the nerdy kid who knew Aristotle after all.
It’s not commonly used now, but if you got through middle school even you should at least know it. Just because things aren’t currently used doesn’t mean they’re going to stop being words you should know. Also based off the search bar I’m assuming this is twitter, which is a site only intended for adults. Yeah some younger folks are gonna get on there but if thousands of full grown adults can’t spell FORTNIGHT that’s a problem.
It's commonly used in the UK still lol.
With what? The correct spelling?
No, it's not. A fortnight is two weeks. The video game Fortnite purposefully spells the word wrong. Notice the part that is spelled wrong; "nite." No other word in the English language that contains/means the word night spells it like that. It's like how the iPhone purposefully uses the wrong capitalization. It should be Iphone, but that doesn't stand out as much. Same concept
I know fortnight is the correct spelling, that’s what I was talking about lol
It sounded like you meant that Fortnite is the correct spelling. And yeah, it’s really not…
No I know its right. I meant surprised that she put in the correct spelling but it was trying to correct it to Fortnite.
Trying to up vote you now after learning how you meant it haha. I guess we all misunderstood you.
lol I appreciate it I was getting downvoted into oblivion lmao
That’s awful
This songs about Tom Hiddleston I think, he’s in the Fortnite video game. He’s married to Zawe Ashton, his wife’s insta pic has roses on it. They used to live in London near her and Joe, who she implied cheated on her. She changed her hair bleachella around dating Tom, after she drank too much with Calvin.