Oxt Weekend

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Thank you, and so do you.

Thank you.

Hi, who is this?

Hi, my name’s Tom, and I’m out in UC San Diego.

Oh, hi, Tom. Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

What’s on your mind?

Well, what I’m confused about is the word next.

Like if I make a reference to the word like next Thursday.

I recently missed a meeting because of the ambiguous use of this phrase.

Oh, you did?

And so, yeah, so if I say on a Friday that I’d like to visit you next Thursday, I think it’s six days from now. That’s clear.

If I say on a Wednesday, let’s meet next Thursday, okay, that’s fine. That’s eight days from now.

Oh, is it?

I don’t know.

This is why I have you on the spot.

If I say on a Monday or Tuesday, though, I’m starting to get gray.

If I say, well, let’s meet next Thursday, then maybe I’m talking about nine or ten days from now, but this is where I start to get gray.

So help.

Tom, you missed a meeting.

What happened?

Did you get in trouble?

Maybe that was a good thing.

I don’t know.

Actually, I showed up seven days early.

I just went to the meeting.

Oh.

I’ve all worked out okay in the end.

That’s the best kind of getting it wrong.

I think you’ve really done a great job of describing the problems here and how far out from the date you can get and still be certain or uncertain.

This is utterly context dependent, and this is never fixed.

You never know what they mean by next Thursday unless you ask them.

You cannot assume.

I think you can certainly clarify it if you say not this Thursday but next Thursday.

Here’s the thing about that.

If you read transcripts of people having natural conversations where they don’t know that linguists are going to be looking at it later to try to figure out what the heck is going on, people almost always renegotiate when this kind of usage is made.

They almost always seek clarity and ask for a restatement in different words to make sure they understand what day is being met.

This is how conversation goes.

And if you fail to do that, then you do show up seven days early and you can’t get the date wrong or you show up late.

Okay, well, I thought you grammarians would have had this sorted out long ago.

I guess it’s just part of the negotiation of the conversation.

We are victims of this horrible creature called English, which is not clear and logical at all.

Well, I tell you, Tom, there are a couple of guys who have tried to solve this problem just in the past couple of months.

If you go to oxtweekend.com, that’s O-X-T weekend dot com, these two guys are proposing that we refer to that weekend after next as Oxt, O-X-T.

They just sort of arbitrarily came up with this word in order to solve this kind of problem.

So let’s throw another word in there just to mess things up even more.

We can create more confusion.

That’s great.

But then there’s the question of the weekend, because Europeans and Americans think of a weekend as either the week is starting on the Sunday or starting on the Monday.

So maybe there’s further ambiguity that goes in even with that expression.

There is, because some people will throw in all of Friday, and some people will throw in only part of Friday, right?

And some people actually don’t include Sunday at all.

They’re like, no, Sunday says start.

Look at my calendar.

Right.

The week starts with Sunday.

All of my friends, the weekend starts Thursday night, so I don’t know.

Oh, academics.

I see.

That’s how it is in the college world.

Yeah, that’s Little Friday.

There you go.

Little Friday, right, right.

Here’s the thing about this.

In the immortal words of Humpty Dumpty, the problem with this is when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.

This is the problem.

In our minds, we know what we mean, but it’s not necessarily transmitted to the hearers.

That’s the problem.

Or in clearly.

Well, I like the description that a conversation is a negotiation.

It’s a give and take.

I mean, it’s not always perfectly clear.

That makes a lot of sense.

We repeat ourselves far more than we know until we look at transcripts of our own speech in which we’re horrified and vow never to speak again.

Wonderful.

All right.

Well, thank you very much for your time.

Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

We’re glad to bloody the waters, Tom.

All right.

Take care.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye.

It’ll never be resolved, right?

Never.

Maybe we’ll help you sort out your language confusion.

Maybe we’ll add more to it.

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