Idioms, Phrases, and Acronyms of the English Language

[Mousse]

This isn't an idiom, but it has me thinking.

If a task is performed once a day, you can say it's done daily. If it's once an hour, it's hourly. So if it's once a minute, can be it "minutely"? My dictionary says no, and that it can only be used to mean "with great attention to detail". But is there anything wrong with using "minutely" in that way?

Someone might confuse minute (60 seconds) with minute (very small, unimportant). Does doing something minutely mean doing it every minute or doing a trifling task?

That's one of the things I hate about English: the same word means something different depending upon its pronunciation.🫤 Unionized is pronounced one way and means one thing to a chemist, and something else to a laborer.

I'm beginning to see the appeal of Newspeak.🤫

 

[Nermal]

Does doing something minutely mean doing it every minute or doing a trifling task?

In this particular case (at work yesterday) I was talking about something that happened four times an hour so I called it "15-minutely". I knew it sounded wrong as I was saying it

That's one of the things I hate about English: the same word means something different depending upon its pronunciation.

English certainly isn't the only strange one though. I know a little Japanese, and here are a couple of song lyrics:

今　いま　イマ - Pronounced "ima ima ima"
「未来」「希望」「自由」「夢」- Pronounced "negai negai negai negai" (but means "mirai kibou jiyuu yume", which is a whole other layer of complication!)

 

[Huntn]

Someone might confuse minute (60 seconds) with minute (very small, unimportant). Does doing something minutely mean doing it every minute or doing a trifling task?

That's one of the things I hate about English: the same word means something different depending upon its pronunciation.🫤 Unionized is pronounced one way and means one thing to a chemist, and something else to a laborer.

I'm beginning to see the appeal of Newspeak.🤫

When I think of min-Ute, I think of small, not “minute” and agree minutely refers to smallish.