Let’s imagine it’s currently Wednesday the 1st. Does “next Saturday” mean Saturday the 4th (the next Saturday to occur) or Saturday the 11th (the Saturday of next week)?

  • Fondots@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    7
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • OtterA
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      arrow-down
      4
      ·
      edit-2
      10 months ago

      Oh yes, I guess I should add more words to the examples

      • “Next Saturday I will go to the movies”
      • “This Saturday I will go to the movies”

      “this” feels more appropriate

      • “Next Sunday I will go to the movies”
      • “This Sunday I will go to the movies”

      “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

        • OtterA
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          10 months ago

          Yep that makes sense :)

        • bitchkat@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          10 months ago

          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.