Re: This day
| From: | Christopher Bates <chris.maths_student@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, March 23, 2007, 7:41 |
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> I've had disagreements with people about this. In my idiolect, there
> is no hard and fast rule as to whether "next Friday" refers to the
> closest following Friday or the one after that.
>
Similarly for me... next Friday for me and a lot of other people I know
around here can mean either the next Friday that occurs, or the Friday
that occurs next week. In fact, the default and most natural
interpretation for me is the next friday that occurs.
> I find the meanings of moving an appointment "back" or "forward"*, as
> well as "up" and "down" (not to mention the "top" and "bottom" of an
> hour), somewhat opaque; I have to consciously think about what they
> mean, failing context. (For some reason I have no trouble with the
> description of time travel as moving backward and forward.)
>
> * Actually, do people even say "move an appointment forward"? I
> thought so while writing that, but now it sounds odd.
>
I dislike these terms as well. I think the issue here is that when
people time travel they conceptually have an orientation time-wise
(facing the future) so using backwards and forwards is fairly clear
(incidentally, I have heard that some cultures conceptualize movement
through time as falling, in which case the future would be down not
forwards). An appointment, being a fixed point in time rather than an
entity which can be thought of as moving through time, has no conceptual
temporal orientation either backwards or forwards, so the terms come
across as being a bit nonsensical to me. It might be a bit easier to
intepret if the movement was specified from the point of view of the
speaker ("let's move the appointment *away*" or "let's move the
appointment *further ahead*").
The issue here is with conceptualizations of time. Moving an
appointment backwards or forwards sounds as odd as, in most contexts,
suggesting that a fixed spatial location with no clear forward
orientation like, for example, the eiffel tower be moved backwards or
forwards, to me anyway (which side of the tower is the front end?).
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