Lee Gibson's dashboard

Dub, that may be the way you parse it, but "next Monday" is always one Monday away for me. There's a clear distinction between "this Monday" (1 to 6 days away) and "next monday (7 to 14 days away). And, unless you've got some research to back up your assertion, it's an open issue as to whether Rincewind's GF, the Sandy devs, and myself are the only ones who think that way.

In other words, Sandy devs, leave it alone. : )

I meant to add, that the "week context" is very important to correctly parsing what most people mean by "next Thursday" - and that "next anything" is *never* in the same week as "today", which is the necessarily implied anchor point for all these relative references.

Of course, weeks *always* begin on Sunday. They just have to... ;-)

I think your research was faulty: the most common Human interpretation of "next {day-of-week}" is this:

If the day-of-the-week in question hasn't occurred yet in THIS week, then you skip to the that day in the *coming* week. That is, if it's Tuesday, then "next Thursday" means nine days from now, not two. Just plain "Thursday" is the proper name for two days from now, never "next Thursday". (That's because "this Thursday" (the Thursday that belongs to "this week" hasn't happened yet.)

On the other hand, if It's Thursday, then no one uses "this Monday" to refer to three days ago (that would be "this past Monday"), instead, they use "next Monday" (or just "Monday" to refer to the coming Monday (the Monday in "next week"). To refer to the Monday in the week after next, the most common and well-understood usage is "a week from Monday".

Unambiguous clarity is often provided even amongst humans by use of specificity qualifiers, such as "this coming Monday", or "the Wednesday after next" (again, this one is subject to the "next" interpretation as described above.

Welcome to the joys of natural language parsing. And remember, there are four perfectly valid ways for a machine to parse "Time flies like an arrow", but humans instantly recognize three of them as being very unlikely:
1. Time flies in a way similar to the way an arrow flies.
2. Time flies as you would time an arrow.
3. Time flies as an arrow would time flies.
4. A particular kind of flies, "time flies", have an affinity for an arrow.

This has caused more than one misunderstanding between my girlfriend and me. She thinks of "next Monday" as Sandy does, to me "next Monday" is the next Monday that comes by.

It's good to know how Sandy handles it.

Hi folks,

This is precisely the way Sandy has been taught to interpret relative symbolic days (e.g. "next monday") -- thanks for answering, cdf12345!

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*"Monday," "on Monday," "This Monday," and "next Monday"*

Here's how Sandy interprets relative symbolic days like "this Monday" or "next Monday":

* "Monday," "this Monday," or "on Monday"

Sandy assumes you mean the very first Monday you'd find (after today) on the calendar.

For example, let's say today were Tuesday the 2nd and you email Sandy: "Remind me to get back to work on Monday." She'll assume you mean Monday the 8th.

* "next Monday"

Sandy assumes you mean the second Monday you'd find (after today) on the calendar.

For example, let's say today were Tuesday the 2nd and you email Sandy: "Remind me to get back to work next Monday." She'll assume you mean Monday the 15th.
--

(I'll be adding the details above to Sandy's online help pages; thanks for the implicit prod to do so!)

As an aside: We went around and around about it, but whichever side you come down on, you have it 1/2 right (logically, at least). So we did the more obvious thing and asked a bunch of people what they meant by "this Monday," "on Monday," "Monday," and "next Monday" and almost every understood things the same way we'd taught Sandy to.

--Rael

I think typically saying "Tuesday" would mean [this] Tuesday, and Next Tuesday is [a week from this Tuesday]
if that makes any sense.

There's this Tuesday : First Tuesday you'll run into
There's next Tuesday, The First Tuesday you'll run into after this Tuesday