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What does "next Saturday" mean
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this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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edit: To be clear, I agree that is how it should work for Saturday. For sunday, I'd prefer to use "next" over "this" when referring to the future
Small change
Say it is Wednesday and you want to refer to the immediate upcoming Sunday. Which sounds better:
To me, "next" feels more appropriate, while "this" feels like it should be past tense, referring to the most recent Sunday that just passed.
This could also be affected by location, and whether Sunday or Monday is the start of the week.
I feel like the tense of the rest of the sentence determines which day you're referring to when you use "this."
"I went to the movies this Saturday." Would be the Saturday that just happened
Vs
"I'm going to the movies this Saturday" would be this coming Saturday
You could of course further disambiguate it by using "this past Saturday" and "this coming Saturday" if you really wanted to, but I think in most contexts the rest of the sentence does it well enough.
Oh yes, I guess I should add more words to the examples
"this" feels more appropriate
"next" feels more appropriate
Even with the "coming" to clarify, it feels more natural to associate "this" with items that are in this week (Sunday to Saturday) and "next" with items that start on the following week's Sunday
I guess part of the disagreement here is about what a week is. Sunday to Saturday vs Monday to Sunday
Yep that makes sense :)
In this context, a week is 7 days starting with the day you're on. So if its a Wednesday, this week starts on that day and goes through Tuesday. On Thursday, this week becomes Thursday through Wednesday. Any day in "this week" would be "this $day". After the last day of "this week", we start next week and the days in that week are "next Saturday" for example.
If you ask someone to meet you somewhere "next Saturday", you'll be stood up by 99.99999% of the population if you're expecting this Saturday.
The standard usage is unanimous. Whatever you think "makes sense", the entire population has already agreed on the standard. Anyone who "understood" you picked up what you meant from other context. Because you used it incorrectly.
I wasn't super clear in my first comment, I clarified more here
https://lemmy.ca/comment/7703958
This was more about digging further into why some words feel correct over others, and if the pattern is consistent enough to define it as:
If there's a chance of ambiguity, I usually clarify
"This" if for days occurring within the next 7 days. The calendar week is irrelevant.
The start of the week has nothing to do with it. "This week" is 7 days from today. Any days within "this week" are "this $day".
Just say on Sunday if you don't like the term This.
Next always means there is one present to which one must come after. "Who is next in line?" Would be correct to use in all situations except when asking who is first in line.
This is not true. "Next in line for the throne" for instance refers to the first person in line for the throne, unless you for some reason count the person currently on the throne as also in line. When a cashier tells "Next!" they expect to serve the first person in line, not the person after them. You'd think someone was crazy if they said "I'm next" when there's people before them.
The only scenario I can think of off the top of my head where "next" is not the first person in line is when you add qualifiers to slice the line and refer to the first person after that slice, eg "after Alice, Bob is next in line."
Next in line for the throne is still "second in line, after the current king" so it doesn't work.
Okay, but I already addressed that in my last comment. The current king isn't in line for the throne in the same way as people already inside a club aren't in the line for the club. "Next in line after Alice" is the same as "first in line after Alice", you're taking a subset of the line and pointing to the first in that subset.