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Comment by caseyohara | Hacker News Reader

The US government has the Plain Language movement which is rewriting policy and legal documents in clear, plain language.

The plainlanguage.gov site is an excellent all-around writing resource. I direct junior developers here when they are trying too hard to sound fancy when communicating technical concepts in documentation and design documents.

Here are some great examples:

https://www.plainlanguage.gov/examples/before-and-after/ambi...

https://www.plainlanguage.gov/examples/before-and-after/mont...

https://www.plainlanguage.gov/examples/before-and-after/use-...

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That's a great initiative, but even with these, I feel there's further opportunity to make these clearer.

As a particular example, is there any reason to keep the vague "second month" in the second example [2], rather than "subsequent month" or "next month"?

[2] https://www.plainlanguage.gov/examples/before-and-after/mont...

Yeah it's not that clear to me. My interpretation would be that if I'm reporting (whatever that means) April, then May would be the first month following, and hence June would be the second month following. Hence the last day I could submit would be June 15th (paper) or June 25th (electronic).

Oh, wow, I think you're absolutely right and I entirely misread that (supposedly "plain") explanation. Having an example, like the one you gave, in the text would be really useful!

Lots of ambiguity with “next”. It’s always so hard to describe “next Wednesday” if it’s Monday or “next week” if it’s Saturday.

My friends from non English countries get very confused that somehow “next Wednesday” when it’s Monday might not mean two days from now but 8 days from now. And how two days in that instance would be referred as “this Wednesday” or “this coming Wednesday”

Which is different way of talking. If you were sitting by the road counting cars and you are at car “n”, Saying “the next car” would refer to car n+1. If your counting wednesdays you experienced “next Wednesday” technically refers to n+2

I stopped saying “this <day>” or “next <day>” and now just say “Wednesday the 25th” for instance.

> It’s always so hard to describe “next Wednesday” if it’s Monday

'Next Wednesday' is always the Wednesday of the calendar week following the current calendar week; doesn't matter what day of the week it currently is. 'This Wednesday' is always the Wednesday of current week on the calendar— even if that day is in the past.

Is it quirky that this expression doesn't instead mean 'the next Wednesday that will occur'? Yes, definitely. But I don't see how it's difficult to describe what it actually does mean.

> I stopped saying “this <day>” or “next <day>” and now just say “Wednesday the 25th” for instance.

I love this. Indexicals in general can be tricky, and I love expressions that rely less or very little at all on context. Sometimes when a friend is telling a complicated story I'll ask them to repeat something tbey just said but with no use of pronouns, for instance, and it always makes interpretation much easier.

As much as I think the actual idioms are perfectly describable, they are somewhat prominently misused. One of my pet peeves is how YouTube's search filters uses its time restriction phrases incorrectly: it says 'today' to mean 'within the past 24 hours', 'this week' to mean 'within the past week', 'this year' to mean 'within the past year', etc. It's Tuesday, and when I search for videos with an upload date from 'this week', I get results including videos uploaded 4 days ago, but this week is not yet 4 days old under any standard convention (e.g., starting the week on Mondays rather than Sundays)... -_-

Your pattern of:

'<term>' is always <my definition>; doesn't matter <other factor>.

Is never going to be true in spoken language. Otherwise we wouldn't be having conversations about confusion and ambiguity in the first place.

At any given time, the lexicon is evolving and some idioms are expanding or on the verge of extinction. Still, there are uses of words and phrases that can reasonably be described as simply wrong at a given time, based on a failure to understand the idiom whose invocation is being attempted. Errors that are sufficiently popular and persistent will eventually just reshape the language, but for a time even an error that is pretty popular or fairly long-lived is still recognizable as an error.

By my intuition, I'd say the uses of 'this week' and friends I described as improper qualify handily, not being all that widespread yet. A couple more marginal examples that stand out to me because erroneous uses are much more common: 'let alone' (which is binary and often used with subject and object reversed), the distinction between envy and jealousy.

You can take up a radical descriptivist position, e.g., that anything spoken by adult native speakers of normal faculties is never erroneous, or re-scope my assertions by saying that I'm gatekeeping speakers who see such usage as correct from my perceived language community or tradition, whatever, but imo the first is trivial and the second boring.

Sometimes specialists misappropriate methodological constraints from their discipline as general ontological or social principles, often discounting an inherent normativity in the way people actually relate to the things those specialists study. I think that's essentially at the heart of the most inflated and controversial uses of concepts like cultural relativism and linguistic descriptivism, and probably applies to nonspecific objections like the one you make above (as opposed to pointing at some specific dialectal variation in the use of such phrases or something like that).

> 'Next Wednesday' is always the Wednesday of the calendar week following the current calendar week; doesn't matter what day of the week it currently is. 'This Wednesday' is always the Wednesday of current week on the calendar— even if that day is in the past.

Nope. This is highly contingent on "which day of the week starts a week" conventions.

If it is Sunday, then "next Wednesday" does not clearly mean the day 10 days from now ... and which one you lean toward will depend (in part) on "week starts on Monday" or "week starts on Sunday".

Yes, the boundaries of the calendar week is a convention that varies and impacts the description I gave in a straightforward and obvious way, so you can expect complications with different conventions on the boundaries of each week. :)

Things are also a bit complicated where I live by the fact that 'this weekend' and 'next weekend' follow the same pattern as I described before, but in a way consistent with calendar weeks beginning on Monday rather than Sunday— even though calendars here conventionally start the week on Sunday and usage of 'this <day of week>' and 'next <day of week>' align with that.

Anyhow, the variation you are getting at is already captured in the description I gave: as the calendar (week boundaries) varies, so does the description's meaning. The description is already indexed to a particular calendar (as is the expression, unfortunately implicitly). :p

My claim was that the meaning is easy enough to describe, not that the phrase is unambiguous. That a phrase can be used ambiguously doesn't mean that descriptions/definitions/characterizations of its general meaning actually have to be ambiguous or vague themselves.

Still yeah, this is a real problem for conversations between people who aren't looking at the same calendar/don't understand a shared convention for week boundaries.

> Things are also a bit complicated where I live by the fact that 'this weekend' and 'next weekend' follow the same pattern as I described before, but in a way consistent with calendar weeks beginning on Monday rather than Sunday— even though calendars here conventionally start the week on Sunday and usage of 'this <day of week>' and 'next <day of week>' align with that.

My sense is that weekend nomenclature is even more confusing.

If it is Monday, and I say "next weekend", I'd wager there's a greater proportion of English speakers (at least) who would understand that to mean the two day period that starts in roughly another 4 days. That is: "next weekend" referred to at any time before (possibly) Friday means "the next one to occur", not "the one that is a part of the next calendar week". By contrast, on Friday "next weekend" pretty clearly means the two days that will occur in about 7 days, rather than "this weekend" meaning the two days that start in less than 24 hours.

Yeah, I think the weekend nomenclature is definitely trickier.

> If it is Monday, and I say "next weekend", I'd wager there's a greater proportion of English speakers (at least) who would understand that to mean the two day period that starts in roughly another 4 days.

To my ear, this is wrong, but I think you're right that it's more common. I think 'this weekend' and 'next weekend' are fuzzier than 'this Tuesday' and 'next Tuesday' because of that misalignment I pointed to before, where 'the weekend' is thought of as a thing that comes at the end of a week, but how we write it most calendars where I live is as a thing that bookends the week on each side.

But I couldn't take up the usage you describe even if I moved to a region where it was predominant, I think. How could I abide a situation where 'this Saturday' occurs during 'next weekend'? That's simply madness. :D

(It's amazing how much we humans manage to communicate with something as messy as natural language-- perhaps especially amazing to programmer-brained people like me, who take some comfort and ease from the simplicity and neatness of the artificial formalisms we work with every day.)

i think the difference is the frequency with which it is necessary to differentiate "this" and "next".

for weekends, most of the time most people are talking in ways that make "this weekend" "the next weekend to occur". so here, "this" and "next" are effectively synonymous.

for days of the week, however, it is more often important to differentiate "this Thursday" (occuring in a couple of days from now, during this week) and "next thursday" (occuring in more than 7 days from now, as part of next week).

If my hunch is correct, it would make conventions highly dependent on social scheduling frequency in a culture.

'Next Wednesday' is always the Wednesday of the calendar week following the current calendar week; doesn't matter what day of the week it currently is. 'This Wednesday' is always the Wednesday of current week on the calendar— even if that day is in the past.

Is it quirky that this expression doesn't instead mean 'the next Wednesday that will occur'? Yes, definitely. But I don't see how it's difficult to describe what it actually does mean.

That's the way it's supposed to be, at least as spoken in the part of Scotland from where my family hails.

But the Americans I know seem to get it wrong about half the time.

What I haven't figured out is if it's a regional (dialectical) thing, or just certain people being "dense", or simply never having been taught the rule.

I’ve lived in the US my whole life and I don’t recall anyone ever getting it wrong. Except this scene in Seinfeld which is obviously Jerry being pedantic for comedic effect.

> Sid: Well I'm going down to visit my sister in Virginia next Wednesday, for a week, so I can't park it.

> Jerry: This Wednesday?

> Sid: No, next Wednesday, week after this Wednesday.

> Jerry: But the Wednesday two days from now is the next Wednesday.

> Sid: If I meant this Wednesday, I would have said this Wednesday. It's the week after this Wednesday.

Yeah, I've given up on expecting to know what people will understand "next Wednesday" to mean. I either say "this coming Wednesday" or "next week on Wednesday". Problems solved.

Well, usually. I've still had conversations like this:

Me: "It'll be next week on Wednesday."

Them: "Whoa, slow down there. Do you mean this coming Wednesday, or next week on Wednesday?"

Me: "It'll be next week on Wednesday."

Them: "Ohhhh! Thank you so much, it wasn't clear before."

If they name a rule after me, I want it to be, "If someone can reasonably interpret a phrase to mean two contradictory things, you have to stop using that phrase if you want clear communication, even if it means being more verbose."

I've taken to saying "Wednesday" or "this Wednesday" to refer to whichever Wednesday is coming up, and then "the Wednesday after this Wednesday" to refer to the following Wednesday. It is a bit wordy but at least it's unambiguous.

And in reading your comment, I just realized there's a difference between casual conversation and writing something down.

I can easily say "Hey, let's meet next Wednesday!" and you may reply with "Oh, great, I'll put it in the calendar, the 8th it is!" and you reply with "No, I meant the 15th" -- and this reduces the ambiguity. This kind of thing would be happening in "real time", so being perfectly clear isn't as important.

However, if you write "next Wednesday" in a contract, and then complete it on the 15th instead of the 8th, and it's taken to Court ... it's a lot harder to figure out what the the original conversation was like, that led to the writing of the contract!

Hence, it makes sense to use as unambiguous language as possible when writing a contract.

This is a great resource for UX design as well.

> The Plain Writing Act of 2010 was signed on October 13, 2010. The law requires that federal agencies use clear government communication that the public can understand and use.

well, no shit! that's amazing

Thanks so much for bringing that to my attention, I'll try to see how I can incorporate those into my own process

Wow TIL. Those before and afters are awesome and I have definitely seen this showing up in government documents. Thanks for sharing.

Am I crazy or does the guidelines page not contain the guidelines? https://www.plainlanguage.gov/guidelines/

Maybe because I’m on mobile?

The guidelines are hidden in the menu in the top-right on mobile.

[X] Good.

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