Let’s imagine it’s currently Wednesday the 1st. Does “next Saturday” mean Saturday the 4th (the next Saturday to occur) or Saturday the 11th (the Saturday of next week)?
The 11th. “This” is the upcoming. “Next” is the one after that.
Source: being a human being and scheduling stuff with people for many decades
edit: To be clear, I agree that is how it should work for Saturday. For sunday, I’d prefer to use “next” over “this” when referring to the future
Small change
Say it is Wednesday and you want to refer to the immediate upcoming Sunday. Which sounds better:
- “Next Sunday I will do X” (edited)
- “This Sunday I will do X” (edited)
To me, “next” feels more appropriate, while “this” feels like it should be past tense, referring to the most recent Sunday that just passed.
This could also be affected by location, and whether Sunday or Monday is the start of the week.
I feel like the tense of the rest of the sentence determines which day you’re referring to when you use “this.”
“I went to the movies this Saturday.” Would be the Saturday that just happened
Vs
“I’m going to the movies this Saturday” would be this coming Saturday
You could of course further disambiguate it by using “this past Saturday” and “this coming Saturday” if you really wanted to, but I think in most contexts the rest of the sentence does it well enough.
Oh yes, I guess I should add more words to the examples
- “Next Saturday I will go to the movies”
- “This Saturday I will go to the movies”
“this” feels more appropriate
- “Next Sunday I will go to the movies”
- “This Sunday I will go to the movies”
“next” feels more appropriate
Even with the “coming” to clarify, it feels more natural to associate “this” with items that are in this week (Sunday to Saturday) and “next” with items that start on the following week’s Sunday
If you ask someone to meet you somewhere “next Saturday”, you’ll be stood up by 99.99999% of the population if you’re expecting this Saturday.
The standard usage is unanimous. Whatever you think “makes sense”, the entire population has already agreed on the standard. Anyone who “understood” you picked up what you meant from other context. Because you used it incorrectly.
I wasn’t super clear in my first comment, I clarified more here
https://lemmy.ca/comment/7703958
This was more about digging further into why some words feel correct over others, and if the pattern is consistent enough to define it as:
- “This”: for when the date is present in the current week (Sunday-Saturday)"
- “Next”: for when the date is present in the next week (starting on the following Sunday)
If there’s a chance of ambiguity, I usually clarify
Just say on Sunday if you don’t like the term This.
Next always means there is one present to which one must come after. “Who is next in line?” Would be correct to use in all situations except when asking who is first in line.
“Who is next in line?” Would be correct to use in all situations except when asking who is first on line.
This is not true. “Next in line for the throne” for instance refers to the first person in line for the throne, unless you for some reason count the person currently on the throne as also in line. When a cashier tells “Next!” they expect to serve the first person in line, not the person after them. You’d think someone was crazy if they said “I’m next” when there’s people before them.
The only scenario I can think of off the top of my head where “next” is not the first person in line is when you add qualifiers to slice the line and refer to the first person after that slice, eg “after Alice, Bob is next in line.”
- This Saturday = the 4th
- Next Saturday = the 11th
Saturday the 4th is part of “this week” so it’s “this Saturday”.
Saturday the 11th is part of “next week” so it’s “next Saturday”.
Otherwise “next Saturday” and “Saturday next week” would mean different things.
Yeah, it’d be great if that were the case. But Saturday the 4th is also just the next Saturday in terms of Saturdays.
It’s an ambiguous term and so always needs clarify gbas you and the person you’re talking to may be thinking along different lines.
If somebody says to me next Sunday I just assumed they mean the next Sunday to come around. Especially because there is a lot of ambiguity about when the week begins and ends. American software likes to default to calling Saturday the final day of the week, and Sunday the first day of the following week.
Technically “next Sunday” is the nearest Sunday (eg “sunday of next week”), however next Saturday is not (because it’s the Saturday of next week"). This assumes we all accept that Sunday is considered the start of the week - which isn’t always the case nowadays.
It’s chaos! But I’m just pointing out that there’s a wired logic to it, which I assume at some point made more sense than it does in our time.
“This Saturday” is the first Saturday occurring in the next 7 days. "“Next Saturday” is the one after “This Saturday”.
I would call the 4th “this Saturday”, and the 11th “next Saturday”. But it’s ambiguous enough to ask for clarification.
