Hi!
On 2013-09-09 07:36, K. Peachey wrote:
On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 12:45 AM, DaB. ts@dabpunkt.eu wrote:
next
FRIDAY, 13. September 19:00-22:00 UTC
"Next", Do you mean This Friday?
Sorry, but this question is not very intelligent, because the auther gave a redundant information on that by telling the exact date.
"next" and "this" together with weekdays are synonymous in many cases. Unfortunately "next" may have more than one meaning in such contexts. Sometimes it means "next week's X" and sometimes it means "the next X from now on", or to be more precise "the X that is next to present in our unidirectional timeline". Actually "this" is also ambiguous, because the timeline is not necessarily understood as unidirectional, but the tense of the verb or other context normally identifies the meant date. So, if anybody says "this" (or "next") and does not give more information, then don't ask him, whether he meant "next" (or "this"), because this won't make it clear. There are better posibilities to talk about dates, e.g. by useing absolute dates. DaB. did that. Thus imho the question was superfluous. :-p
Btw. this is not a pure English problem. For example German has got the same disambiguity.
bye seth