The Wiles Way

I came across this question earlier today, while researching for something else and found people discussing and arguing over a bunch of awesome words that are niche-specific. These terms describe periods of time, which are most commonly used to identify and define other things or in financial reports. I could not find a single list/chart of these terms or a single word or phrase that includes these terms, perhaps someone can help me with this.

While doing this research, I read a post that hit on one of my sore spots, because it discouraged the use of the word Tertile, citing the complaint, “Why use a word that most readers will have to look up in a dictionary to understand?”. I don’t disagree that the term is unlikely to ever be a common use word, not even as common as its relative terms (such as quarterly and annually), but I do have a serious issue with the statement as a whole. Seeing as I do not wish to attack a person, but I do wish to attack a concept, I am bringing the problem here.

Quarterly is too hard a word for some people, but yet there is a time and a place for it. As such, it is a commonly used term gardening and in the world of finance and business, but far less used in other areas. Granted that I just can’t see “tertile” flowing off my lips in a sentence describing how often I do something… I have to file tertile reports (every three months or four times a year). It just doesn’t sound right, which means it will never be used, unless someone in a position of authority decides they just have to have a three month report and just love the term. No one is going to reach for this term automatically.

You might think triannually would work, but that is actually every four months and occurs three times a year and the popular term for that is quarterly. You might try to throw some terms together, like quadranually. It looks a little clunky, but it might catch on. (Quadrennially is every 4 years.)

The meat of this article:

I take exception to discouraging the use of less commonly used terms, just because someone might have to look something up. As shown in the example of quarterly (above), there are a lot of terms out there that are specific to tasks, such activities that are done infrequently and work related tasks that are fairly narrow to a specific type of field. Should we give up the word “rafting,” because I haven’t done it or talked to anyone about it in over 10 years? NO! Should we not learn what a cumulonimbus cloud is, because we don’t work in the weather industry? NO!

How far do we go before we say, “I know enough words and I don’t need any more for understanding the world around me and communicating with others.”? If we never learned new words (often accomplished after childhood by looking up words that we don’t understand or don’t see very often), we may as well all be grunting and pointing.

If you don’t know a word that someone uses or you find in an article, please look it up!

A stagnant mind rots from disuse, just like a scummy pond. The more words we know, the more creative we can be, because the variety of concepts a larger and larger word pool encompasses is just like using larger and larger numbers.

Given the digits 0 through 9 to create a two digit number, you have a relatively small number of possibilities for numbers that you can come up with. Assuming we’re working with whole or positive numbers, this gives you 90 possible numbers, because 0 through 9 are single digit numbers.  Every digit you add after that increases the number of possibilities exponentially. You can figure it out like this: If you have 10 you have 10 possible permutations. When you add a digit, you have 100 possible permutations, so times or multiplied by 10. 10×10=100, 100×10=1,000, 1,000×10=10,000. Simple, because to times by 10, all you are doing is adding a 0 at the far right of the number.

Learning is essential, not only to success, but to self-realization, world-realization, galaxy-realization, and universe-realization. What is your place in existence? If you are not willing and able to question everything and simply accept what you currently see or understand as “they way things are,” you will miss so many beautiful and wonderful marvels. You might accept many lies or myths as the truth. Granted that sometimes we find out that a myth was actually a reality that we did not understand yet, myths are often things we make up to quantify what we have to deal with in life, but have little to no grounding in reality.

If I learn about ambient today, I might also learn about ambient temperature, then I might decide to learn what can radiate heat and create a change in the ambient temperature. After that I might learn a better and more efficient way to heat our houses or melt ice off the roads. I could be amazing, but not if I don’t go out of my way to learn something new.

Quote: Once you stop learning, you start dying — Albert Einstein

Please learn, grow, and make every day of your life an adventure!

* Ambient: area around or surrounding

* Permutation: In math, the arrangement of numbers.

Note: If someone can come up with a better or nicer way to get this point across, I welcome recommendations.

2nd Note: If you don’t post your responses directly to my website, I probably won’t see it. I generally only see responses to my own Facebook posts, and which do not post to my website. And I have to approve posts, before anyone else can see posts submitted to my website. It cuts down on the unsolicited advertisements, viruses, spam, sheer rudeness, and profanity.