But there are two ends of any line, one on each side. Not two ends, both of which are on the same side.

Exactly. A sausage has two ends, the beginning end and the end end, and so shall the week

Then it'd be called "weekends", not "weekend".

We don’t call it “nights” even though one is split over two days (before midnight and after).

Just call it "evening" if it's before midnight. That way you get four nicely subdivided periods.

00-06 - night

06-12 - morning

12-18 - afternoon

18-24 - evening

Would need to refactor the name of "midnight" tho to minimize confusion. But if we use it as a starting point to count hours in a day from, it doesn't make sense to simultaneously designate it as a middle of anything.

(BTW, such subdivision is actually common in many places of the world.)

I feel we've just rediscovered why appeals to grammar[0] don't actually solve much of anything. (Not saying you're appealing to grammar, just that grammar is generally not that useful for discerning... anything really.)

Anyway, to be a bit more substantive: What really baked my noodle when I was younger is the fact that the seasons and the night/day cycle are much more disconnected than it appears when you live on Earth. Of course, it makes sense when you understand the tilt/rotation thing, but still... it really weirds me out sometimes.

[0] English in this case, but any language, really.

That only applies to things that are not obviously oriented. No one would try to argue that when they said "we'll do a recap at the end of meetings", what they meant is both the start and the end. This is not ambiguous at all and I don't even believe you believe in this argument.

Well I’d suggest the “obvious” orientation is actually the effect of what you believe the words to mean, not the cause.

This is what I was taught, I do indeed think it’s pretty silly, but it wouldn’t even be in the top 100 weirdest things about our language/culture/norms “space.” We’re surrounded by idiosyncrasies!

In a ring buffer, you have a start and an end pointer, not two end pointers.

If we think of it like iterators in C++, though, begin() is Monday, and end() is the next Monday.

If Saturday is weekend, then Sunday is one-past-the-end. ;)

One-past-the-end is the way.