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Comment by tkgally | Hacker News Reader

Another couple of common words that can cause confusion are “last” and “next” in reference to days of the week. If today is Monday, for example, when are “next Wednesday,” “next Thursday,” “next Friday,” and “next Saturday”? The same week? Or the following week? What about if today is Sunday or Tuesday?

Twenty years ago, when I was working as a dictionary editor, I wrote a note about the problem:

https://www.gally.net/leavings/00/0014.html

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Jasper Fforde has written a series of humorous novels about a character named Thursday Next. [1, 2]

[1] https://www.carnegielibrary.org/staff-picks/thursday-next-se...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thursday_Next

They kinda found a solution in French, if you want to be sure that it's Wednesday next week, it's "mercredi en huit" literally translated to "Wednesday in eight (days)". So it's the first Wednesday following today + 8 days( included today)

Edit : height VS eight when translating huit

I don't speak French, but it seems a lot more likely that "en huit" would translate as "in 8 (days)" rather than "in height (days)". Are you a native speaker and know better, or might this be a mistake?

I assume it's a hyper-corrective insertion of an 'h'

Clearly a mistake!

After noticing this problem at college, I settled on constructions concise and precise, such as:

this week Thursday, this coming Thursday, next week Thursday, Thursday after next

And a proposed solution: https://oxtweekend.com/

Would “coming Wednesday“ or just “on Wednesday”, or “on Wednesday in a week” be less ambiguous?

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