

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Fiscal and Physical

Easily confused words

Fiscal means financial.
We all have our pet peeves, and one of mine pertains to the words "fiscal" and "physical." I have a strong urge to correct people who confuse and misuse these words.

Today, at work, one of the managers said that the "physical year" was just about to end so we should not allow sales to slide. Ugh. What on earth is a "physical year"?

Let's review these these two adjectives.

Fiscal means financial. The word fis-cal has two syllables.

Physical either has a scientific meaning (related to physics) or it describes something about a body (related to the physique.) The word phys-i-cal has three syllables.

Which adjective should be used to describe a business year, a year that begins and ends on arbitrary dates set by accountants? The answer is -- fiscal! It's a fiscal year! It's a purely financial period of time. There's nothing scientific or bodily about it.

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(Laura Ingalls Wilder, 1867-1957)

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