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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I think you’re both right, but this is a great reason for ISO8601. This weekend is the weekend in the current week. In most of the world it’s Monday-Sunday which makes this way clearer, in which case he would have said “next weekend” and you would be completely correct, but if you’re in a country that starts on a Sunday then “this weekend” is two things. Sunday and Saturday, with 5 days in between. Since you were already in part of the two parter you could only be referring to the next part, the upcoming Saturday, part of this week.


  • tyler@programming.devtoxkcd@lemmy.worldxkcd #3232: Countdown Standard
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    2 days ago

    This doesn’t make sense from a linguistics standpoint though. So next Thursday is the Thursday this week, but next week isn’t this week, it’s the week after this one. So what’s the Thursday in that week, the next next Thursday? It just doesn’t work.

    Anything in this week (Sunday-Saturday or Monday-Sunday) even stuff from a few days ago -> this <day of the week>.

    Anything from last week -> last <dotw>

    Anything in next week -> next <dotw>

    It’s incredibly simple and it’s logically consistent and it works in every situation unless you are talking to someone from a different country that uses a different starting day. And even then it works the majority of the time.


  • If next was the next occurrence of the day you’d be saying “next Wednesday on a Tuesday” and be talking about tomorrow, which is frankly ludicrous. I’ve also never heard anyone use a rolling week for “this” and this is such a funny conversation to come up because I literally had this confusion last Sunday (not this previous Sunday, as in yesterday, also note that this lines up well with using “last week”), because I was talking with several Venezuelans, a Chilean, a Mexican, and a Salvadoran, along with some Americans and this exact confusion came up but not because it was a rolling week, or because next means the next occurrence, but because they considered the week to start on Monday, not Sunday. So “this Thursday” meant the previous Thursday, since it was part of that week. Next Thursday meant the coming Thursday (the part of the next week).

    I mention the nationalities because it’s pretty uncommon to start a week on a Sunday like Americans do.

    Weirdly I looked it up and the internet says those countries start their weeks on Monday but that sure wasn’t what the people I talked to thought. 🤷


  • The rule makes perfect sense (and is how I’ve always used it), but this article actually misses a major point which I just learned last week when talking to some native Spanish speakers. In most English speaking countries, the week starts on Sunday. This isn’t the case for many, many other countries though. So saying “this Friday” on a Sunday really really confuses people. That’s exactly what happened to me last week because it was a Sunday and we were talking about a Friday and she got very very confused.