It’s Friday, which as it happens is a hebdomadal occurrence. Hebdomadal means anything that happens once every seven days. It’s a rather rare word, seeing as how most of the time when anyone wants to refer to something like that they simply say“weekly.” But the word did appear in a 2008 article in the Liverpool Daily Post: “It’s full moniker is Pre-Deadline Tension, the bane of wordsmiths such as myself with a hebdomadal column to devise, write, rewrite, endlessly tweak, and, usually at the eleventh hour, email to a hotly expectant press.”
Until 2000 the University of Oxford in England had a committee called the Hebdomadal Council. It was evidently a group that met every week for some reason or other. It still continues, but it was renamed the University Council, which is really less informative, since now we don’t even know how often they convene. Or maybe they just wanted to be more flexible about their schedule.
“Hebdomadal” comes from the Greek word “hepta”, for seven. You can find the same root word in “heptathlon” and the seven-sided “heptagon” shape. It entered English by way of the Latin “hebdomadalis,” but probably due to the lax approach to schedules back in the day, it didn’t appear in English until the 1700s. Even by then the word “week” was readily available, so hebdomadal really never became very popular.
You might imagine someone who wanted to use “hebdomadal” being questioned in a Socratic dialog by some interlocutor who couldn’t see the point of abandoning “weekly;” it would be a difficult case to make in the maieutic method. But then, anyone who talks about the “maieutic method” probably would rather use “hebdomadal,” now that I think of it. The “maieutic method” is the same as the Socratic method where a series of questions leads to (or can lead to) a change in views. This word also comes from Greek; its root is “maieuesthai,” which meant “to act as a midwife.” The method, and the use of that particular word as a metaphorical representation of it, comes from the Greek idea that the truth is already there in your mind (in everybody’s mind, in fact), but it has to be brought out of the shadows into the conscious mind by a question from somebody who already knows the answer and is leading the other person to work out the truth for herself. The word comes from the 1600s, and it’s more common nowadays than you might expect, but it’s entirely philosophical and psychotheraputic jargon. It’s jargon in education, for that matter — it’s quite possible the Hebdomadal Council at Oxford engaged in the maieutic method from time to time — even weekly.
