What if the person saying that means “Friday this week” sometimes and “Friday next week” other times? How can you know that they don’t from an isolated utterance? Can you know with reasonable certainty that the person saying it knows what you think they mean?
From context you might know if it seems like they know how to use the phrase, but I always struggle to understand these quirks, perhaps because I heard these terms as an adult and haven’t used them much myself, or been exposed to them and the context enough to immerse myself in the colloquial usage by diffusion.
This is close to weird constructions like “x is deceptively y” like “the dog is deceptively large” which, without already knowing the size of the dog, makes me feel like a dunce because I don’t know while not giving me enough specificity to know if the the largeness is what is deceptive or just the perception of the largeness. It’s a syntactical tarpit.
> I use "<day> week" in conversation, but I'd say it's falling out of favour. I mostly use it with my parents.
I am a native English (US) speaker, and I think it’s a British English thing perhaps, as I heard it all the time in Australia, along with other week-related terms like fortnight.
> What if the person saying that means “Friday this week” sometimes and “Friday next week” other times?
Well, I suppose they could, but then what if they meant Thursday?
“Friday week” is surprisingly unambiguous. It always means “count forward from today until a Friday, then add a week”. Its partner is “Friday coming”, which is “count forward until a Friday”.
> > What if the person saying that means “Friday this week” sometimes and “Friday next week” other times?
> Well, I suppose they could, but then what if they meant Thursday?
> “Friday week” is surprisingly unambiguous. It always means “count forward from today until a Friday, then add a week”. Its partner is “Friday coming”, which is “count forward until a Friday”.
That’s good that it’s unambiguous to you, as you happen to be correctly interpreting the meaning from the words as written, but I don’t read the context the same way, as in, your reading doesn’t always read as written, when I’m doing the reading. It comes naturally to you, it seems, but less so to me, if I can explain.
To me, “Friday coming/this coming Friday” is just as underspecified because it communicates explicitly ambiguously that which is definitively known due to unknown knowns and/or unknown unknowns: you don’t know if I know what day it is today or not, and on days I haven’t been outside yet, I may not know if it’s AM/PM or midnight or noon. I could think I know what day it is and be honestly mistaken, leading me to believe that the next/coming Friday is a day away, as in tomorrow, but miss that it’s already Friday today, making the listener think I mean a week from now, when I mean right now for events taking place on the night of the day in question.
I also think it’s ambiguous what “coming/next Friday” means, because it’s obvious that the one coming up this week is coming up, so it seems too on the nose to refer to it as such, which makes me think that it’s a week from now, but this time, they actually do mean the Friday a few days from now.
I think this discussion of "Friday week" has people talking at cross purposes, and there may not be any real disagreement. It's an idiom, and if you're part of a (sub-)culture that has this idiom, its meaning is unambiguous. But if it's unfamiliar to you, you can't be expected to deduce its meaning from first principles.
Someone upthread mentioned "half ten", which is similar: if you're familiar with the idiom, you know it unambiguously means half past ten, but if you're not, you can't be sure that it doesn't mean 9.30 (or, for the literalists among us, 5.00).
Anyone telling you that you're wrong for not understanding it, or that you should start using it even though those around you are unfamiliar with it, is being silly; but I don't think anyone here is doing that.
> is being silly; but I don't think anyone here is doing that.
I think it’s silly that English has these quirks, and it’s silly to engage with them as points of argument, which isn’t what I mean to do, but rather to show how my own thought process works, silly it may be. It’s okay to embrace silliness in the environment as long as it isn’t detracting from understanding. This thread is exploring the words, not arguing with each other or trying to convince the other, so it’s not at cross purposes to me. But I think I agree that there may be no disagreement?
Let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the silly. ;)
Fair enough! I didn't mean to push against any exploration of this sort of thing; I think it's interesting too (and even if I didn't, that would be no reason to try to impose my feelings on others).
I think the main thing I was responding to was this --
> That’s good that it’s unambiguous to you, as you happen to be correctly interpreting the meaning from the words as written, but I don’t read the context the same way, as in, your reading doesn’t always read as written, when I’m doing the reading.
-- which I (perhaps wrongly) took to be arguing against, or slightly misunderstanding, the claim of the person you were responding to. I don't think they were claiming that the words as written are inherently unambiguous, and I don't think it's a question of reading the context; I think it's just an idiomatic phrase that has a fixed meaning for those who natively use it. It's a bit like a dialect word; it's only ambiguous in the sense that people who don't speak the dialect won't know how to interpret it.
(It could turn out that I'm factually wrong about this, and that there are different groups who use the phrase in mutually contradictory ways! But so far I've only seen a split between groups who use it to mean "the Friday after this coming Friday" and groups who don't use it at all.)
I didn’t interpret anything you said as prescriptive, but it did seem to be perhaps peremptory in a way where you were trying to adjudicate a supposed dispute that wasn’t actually occurring, but I appreciate your contributions as descriptive of how you interpreted the thread and your views on the term. I appreciated the nuanced interrogatory approach in a Socratic way and its lack of sophistry. I think you understand the situation, but some people struggle with how to respond to these phrasings more than others perhaps.
Interestingly, in the languages where do you say "half ten", it unambiguously means 9:30 not 10:30. For example, in German you would say halb zehn (or "half ten" / "half to ten"), which means 9:30.
> “Friday week” is surprisingly unambiguous. It always means “count forward from today until a Friday, then add a week”.
Well, no, the typical case would be that it means nothing at all and the other person thinks you're having a stroke. Zero potential meanings isn't actually better than two potential meanings.
You know what's really unambiguous? "Friday the 8th".
That's just a spicy way of saying "I am unfamiliar with this idiom". Nobody is saying you should unilaterally start using it in the US, or in any other context where nobody would understand you. They're saying that, for those who do have this idiom, it is unambiguous.
There's a little bit more to it than that. I am unfamiliar with the idiom, and the idiom does not appear to be grammatical English, suggesting that something has gone wrong rather than that the speaker is using a foreign vocabulary item. Most idioms don't look like word salad, but this one does.
"Friday week" would ordinarily mean a week characterized in some way by Friday, but of course there can be no such week. There could be a "Good Friday week".
Your original complaint was that the phrase is meaningless. To people who are familiar with it, it's obviously not meaningless! For those who are unfamiliar with it, I'd say the bafflingness is more feature than bug; you'll immediately know that you've encountered an unfamiliar phrase (or missed a word), rather than trying to piece it together logically and coming away with an illusion of understanding.
(Yeah, it would be even better if it just made sense transparently and unambiguously to all listeners. But that leaves us with a complaint about idioms in general, not this one in particular.)
> "Friday week" would ordinarily mean a week characterized in some way by Friday, but of course there can be no such week. There could be a "Good Friday week".
I think there was that one or maybe two times the Catholic Church changed the day or date? I don’t know much about it but that may have resulted in a week without a Friday, which would make the next one pretty good, when it happened.
> Sorry, of which month in which year under what calender?
Whichever could be a theoretical possibility for whatever you're describing the date of. In almost all cases, there will only be one choice. But in other cases, the speaker will provide the rest of the date.
Exactly the point, requires clarification, doesn't stand on it's own, is hardly unambiguous.
Moreover most people are surrounded by by people using the same calendar and don't clarify, it's an issue for travellers and data reconciliation across boundaries.
That said, it's the month and year that are most lacking from a simple { Dayname, day of month } pairing.
From context you might know if it seems like they know how to use the phrase, but I always struggle to understand these quirks, perhaps because I heard these terms as an adult and haven’t used them much myself, or been exposed to them and the context enough to immerse myself in the colloquial usage by diffusion.
This is close to weird constructions like “x is deceptively y” like “the dog is deceptively large” which, without already knowing the size of the dog, makes me feel like a dunce because I don’t know while not giving me enough specificity to know if the the largeness is what is deceptive or just the perception of the largeness. It’s a syntactical tarpit.
> I use "<day> week" in conversation, but I'd say it's falling out of favour. I mostly use it with my parents.
I am a native English (US) speaker, and I think it’s a British English thing perhaps, as I heard it all the time in Australia, along with other week-related terms like fortnight.