[retsibsi]

I think this discussion of "Friday week" has people talking at cross purposes, and there may not be any real disagreement. It's an idiom, and if you're part of a (sub-)culture that has this idiom, its meaning is unambiguous. But if it's unfamiliar to you, you can't be expected to deduce its meaning from first principles.

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.

[aspenmayer]

> 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. ;)

[retsibsi]

Fair enough! I didn't mean to push against any exploration of this sort of thing; I think it's interesting too (and even if I didn't, that would be no reason to try to impose my feelings on others).

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.)

[aspenmayer]

I didn’t interpret anything you said as prescriptive, but it did seem to be perhaps peremptory in a way where you were trying to adjudicate a supposed dispute that wasn’t actually occurring, but I appreciate your contributions as descriptive of how you interpreted the thread and your views on the term. I appreciated the nuanced interrogatory approach in a Socratic way and its lack of sophistry. I think you understand the situation, but some people struggle with how to respond to these phrasings more than others perhaps.

[Daneel_]

Interestingly, in the languages where do you say "half ten", it unambiguously means 9:30 not 10:30. For example, in German you would say halb zehn (or "half ten" / "half to ten"), which means 9:30.