Friday Wednesday or Wednesday Friday?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Charles, and I’m calling from Exotic Rochester, New York.

Exotic Rochester.

Absolutely.

What’s so exotic about Rochester?

That’s got to be a rhetorical question.

Everybody knows.

Home of Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass, George Eastman.

Okay.

Historical paradise.

There you go.

Right.

So what’s going on in Exotic Rochester there in terms of language?

Well, there’s quite a throwdown going here.

I work in an ad agency where I’m a senior copywriter, and I’m having a bit of a battle with the head copywriter, Jen, who’s listening in, by the way, just off to the side of me, just to make sure I don’t misrepresent her.

Good news.

Very eager about that.

Anyway, we’re trying to figure out what do you call those kind of weeks where you have a vacation coming and you have time off.

For example, if I’m taking Thursday and Friday off, Wednesday is my last day of the week.

So my Wednesday is the last day I’m going to come in.

So for me, that’s now magically a Friday.

So I like to say that it’s a Wednesday Friday.

It’s a Wednesday that is now magically turned into a Friday.

Now, Jen, being the proofreader and the copy editor, she says, no, technically, that the day is, it’s got to be a Friday Wednesday because the Friday’s acting as an adjective or something like that.

It’s a grammar thing, so I lost interest.

It’s a grammar thing, so I lost interest.

Wait, no, that cannot be allowed.

She believes she’s right. I believe I am right. Because to me, it just sounds more fun to say, you know, it’s a Wednesday, Friday. It was a Wednesday, but now it’s a Friday.

And she said, it might be more fun to say, but you’re just technically wrong. And we wanted to weigh in here, and not that either one of us are ever going to give into this, because all that’s really at the stake now is the ability to give eye rolls to each other, which is the office equivalent of like a drop kick or something. Or a mic drop. So just to summarize, you’ve got a short week. It ends for you on a Wednesday. You’ve been calling it a Wednesday Friday.

She’s been calling it a Friday Wednesday. Correct. I have a question.

Are you hyphenating these? Wow, that brings up a whole other battle.

I might do it because I like hyphens. Jen’s shaking her head saying there’s just no way she would do that. Oh no, so now you’re fighting about that.

Wednesday Friday, Friday Wednesday. I want to talk about tofu for a second. What? Yeah, the reason I want to talk about tofu because I think we need to get away from these days of the week and start thinking about where this happens in other parts of language.

Okay, well, I want to talk about soy.

Oh, soy is the same thing, right?

So we take tofu and we make tofu dogs and tofu burgers, right?

Tofurky, which is tofu turkey like tofu.

And so what we’ve done here is we’ve added the noun tofu as an adjective, kind of.

It’s called an attributive noun in front of another noun to describe that noun.

And I think when we look at these examples of tofu, we see that Friday, Wednesday is the best choice here.

Because what we were describing is a Wednesday with Friday characteristics.

The Friday is acting like an attributive noun.

And if you had listened to your copy editor when she was talking about the grammar, you probably would have been persuaded.

Well, like her, I kind of phased out there.

But I did catch that you think that she’s on the correct path.

I do.

You should never challenge your copy editors.

No, that’s not true.

But I’m just saying they’re a very wise bunch, and they know things.

Yeah, and I will admit to be a hyphenating kind of guy, Jen would cross them out all the time.

Really?

Except, I’ll bet, if you’re using Friday, Wednesday to modify something else, like I’m wearing my Friday, Wednesday clothes.

Oh, yeah, she’d let that go, I bet.

Sure, yeah.

Yeah, then you would hyphenate it because it’s attributive in that way.

So I guess in the end, while I was creative with it and had a lot of fun with it, I’m still technically wrong.

And I will have to admit this at the Nest Agency meeting because everybody was very curious on where this was.

You guys were the final thing here before it came to dueling pistols.

Well, props to you for bringing it to our attention and just taking the chance that you might be wrong on national radio.

That’s such a harsh way of saying it, but I appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

Bye, Charles.

Bye now.

Take care.

The thinking here is that Friday is the attributive describing noun because the Friday-ness of the Wednesday is what distinguishes that Wednesday from other Wednesdays.

Yes.

I am actually following that.

Yes.

I tried.

I worked hard on that.

Right.

Friday, Wednesday.

Because otherwise, it would be as if you had, say, Monday and Tuesday off, and then your Friday was actually a Wednesday Friday, right?

Because you’re starting the week or something like that.

Yeah.

Right?

I just muddled it up some more.

Well, that’s what we do here.

But the soy and tofu comparisons are apt because we’ve taken nouns, and nouns frequently in English take a position as an adjective where they describe other nouns.

Right.

Right?

Right.

Think about car seat.

Right?

Both of those are nouns, and yet we’re talking about a kind of seat that’s in a car.

Right.

Restaurant critic.

Yes.

Exactly.

We know you have a dispute at your workplace, and we’d love to try to solve it.

So give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send us an email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.