I literally just said "Nothing from my end" on a zoom call. Still waiting on my million dollars though so not sure how reliable this method is.
The tech industry is insane. While my "Nothing from my end" joke was tongue-in-cheek, it's parodying a very real dynamic.
Can you explain this to my pea brain?
I have seen it. People who have been with the company for decades, people who were principal level, people who always had awesome performance reviews.
For me:
couple(formal) = 2
couple(informal) = 2-3
few = 3-5
half-dozen = 6
[gap]
ten-or-so = 9-11
dozen(formal) = 12
dozen-ish(informal) = 11-14
And don't get me started on "this Friday" vs "next Friday"...
"Next Friday" is always a week+ away. If it's Tuesday and I say "next Friday", I ALWAYS mean the day 10 days away.
If someone says "next Friday" to me and they mean the one in a few days I'll look at them like they're crazy.
I use "<day> week" in conversation, but I'd say it's falling out of favour. I mostly use it with my parents.
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.
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”.
> 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.
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.
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. ;)
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.)
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".
> You know what's really unambiguous? "Friday the 8th".
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.
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.
"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".
(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.)
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.
If you're unfamiliar with the phrase then it's likely meaningless, but if you do know then there's no chance of getting it incorrect.
For that matter, the missing word could be this, as in “Friday (this) week” versus “Friday (that (as in the next one after the one contrasted with via the word this) week”. I have no way to disambiguate this, so I ask something like “Friday after tomorrow” or “Friday the 13th” or something. It’s hard being me at times, I’ll admit.
Next Friday is sometimes too ambiguous, you can never be sure you share the same definition with the other person. Is it the same as This Friday (the very next occurring Friday), or Friday Week (ie next week's Friday).
Maybe I should ask my kids...
Interestingly they both had different definitions of Next Friday though, and both thought there was only one way of defining it.
What if it’s Friday where you are, but isn’t for me yet? Would that be a week from tomorrow or two weeks from tomorrow, for me or for you?
(a) I generally don’t schedule things in the middle of the night
and
(b) it’s well understood amongst my social circles that if you’re for some reason trying to schedule something at the end of a party at 2am Friday then for basically all purposes it’s still Thursday
—-
But also once time zones are involved it’s better to just give a date, time and zone for clarity. That doesn’t mean people need to apply the same to their personal life and use it even where shorthand is unambiguous.
I use it to mean, a time up to two years ago. She uses it to mean up to no more than a month.
I think the disagreement is because I have a better memory - two years ago does not feel so distant to me. It is a silly and fun thing to argue about, leading to some agreements on terminology:
A while ago - 2- 10 years
Back in the day - 10+ years ago
And just to troll her, I boldly make the claim, "just now" means any time between now and a week ago.
"I had a sandwich a while ago" is wastly different from "they had a child a while ago".
"The other day" and "back in the day" might not differ as much but still...
I'm no authority but to me using "the other day" as a phrase is trying to impart a rough reference to a point in time.
Which means we're talking in "day" timeframes where week or month wouldn't be suitable. I would expect "the other day" to be within a week, but accept no more than a month.
Similarly "some months ago" = probably less than 6 months but definitely no more than a year.
The world is a wonderful place and the ways we humans can confuse communication seemingly knows no bounds. But I don't want a proscriptive definition for each little casual phrase as I think this flexibility in language is why it keeps changing and being alive!
several = 5-10
handful = 10-20
Personally, after having worked in a hardware store, I always confirm. "grab me a couple of those please" - "is two enough, or do you need a few extra?"
I'm one of those people for whom a couple is 3-5, but never 2. I would just say "two".
It's more than several, but still a manageable number.
Use depends on context, like all language, and deliberately choosing a situation that doesn't suit the language will obviously result in confusion.
Anything that's a word instead of a precise number implies a range to me (eg, few, handful, several).
I don’t know where I got my idea of handful, but it probably came from how high I can count using the fingers on one hand. So far that understanding seems to work for me when other people say it as long as I do what you said and treat it as an approximation.
On the “several” topic, I used to think it meant “about seven” because of the shared “sev” prefix, but it didn’t take long to realize several has a much bigger range than that.
Still not as amorphous as the word "now" and its various prefixes when it comes to South Africans and time.
For me it depends on the formality. For example, a married couple is never more than two people.
In practice my immediate response for "several" would be to use it interchangeably with "few". 3-5.
But all these comments make me think that maybe it should fill my [gap] at "seven-ish". I mean, the "seve" bit does kinda lend itself.
[0] Tangentially, several is from 'Medieval Latin separalis "separable," ' as in '(as in went their several ways)' . So to link it with "seven" would be a weird thing to do but I imagine this kind of thing happens with a living language.
[0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/several
As for "handful"... you and I are worlds apart on that one! :-P Hand has four fingers, five digits. So "handful" is 4-5 for me. But as other comments alluded, if the [thing] is a batch of small something (like sand) then it's simply how much you can grasp.
As I mentioned these words have surprisingly varied definitions between people! One of the wonders of a living language.
“Several..?”
This of course led to much ridicule and many memes in the fandom, and Survivor even titled the seventh episode of that season "Episode Several". In post-season interviews the contestant is still adamant that several means seven.
The day I learned that the acidic feel of pineapples comes from it actually digesting you instead of the opposite is the day I stopped using them.
Wait, what?
https://www.thespruceeats.com/flesh-eating-enzymes-of-pineap...
Riiight
I remember being confused as a kid what the difference is between a couple and a few. Turns out sometimes there is no difference.
Yeah you're very much out of touch, what kind of income are you earning or is this more wishful thinking?
[0] https://www.investopedia.com/personal-finance/how-much-incom...
I should say, at the start I wasn't married and had no dependents. Also, for large parts of those 20 years, I didn't need to own or use a car.