So, the standard US weekend is Saturday–Sunday, even amongst the Sunday=1 holdouts. I say holdouts, because it helps to understand that this isn’t agreed on even within the US. Not to suggest that the holdouts are a minority, I honestly don’t know but I doubt it. I think, apart from the initial puzzlement of recognizing the inconsistency, most of us don’t give much thought at all to which day is 1. “Weekend” generally is used colloquially to mean whichever two simultaneous days the speaker or audience is off work, insofar as they have two consecutive days off work.

I believe, but I may be wrong, that the inconsistency arises from Sunday being the Christian sabbath. That “starts” the week, but it’s a traditional day off for religious observance. And this tradition goes back well before the 40 hour work week, and the common Monday–Friday work week. Which is to say that “weekend” didn’t originally have connotations about which days were work days, they were typically all work days except for the Christian sabbath. Which as a retcon makes the present colloquial usage even odder, even if it’s (maybe?) more consistent with how other countries/cultures use it.

> I say holdouts, because it helps to understand that this isn’t agreed on even within the US.

I disagree. I can’t remember having ever seen calendars display any day other than Sunday as the first of the week, except in the case of computer software made by non-Americans who didn’t think to localize it.

There’s still ambiguity in verbal language. On Sunday, if someone messages you “let’s do this next week” - do they mean “in the next 6 days” or “after 7 days from now”?

"Next" has terrible ambiguity, beyond the phrase "next week." If it's Monday and someone says "next Thursday" do they mean the coming Thursday (+3) or the one after that (+10)? I assume the latter, except when it's said by people who I know disagree!

But even with people I don't put in that category, I'd hesitate to assume +13 days if they said "next Sunday" on Monday. More likely they mean +6 when it's so far out...

Tell me about it. My wife and I cannot agree on the meaning of "next" for almost anything, and we are Spanish speakers.

For example, when driving, to her "turn at the next corner" means "the corner after the next", while to me it means "the corner the car is about to cross". What I call "the next corner" to her is "this corner".

Same with days, of course.

It drives me crazy!

I don’t know if it would translate, but I’ve had good outcomes navigating with my brother by saying “following” instead of “next”. As in “okay we’re coming to Delaware street and we’ll take a left at the following intersection”. It’s not even language my brother uses but he immediately understood “next next not this next” and so I stuck with it.

Oh wow. The only context in which I (and people around me) use "next" like that is with days, which is confusing in its own right, but at least it's contained.

“Next Thursday” vs “next week Thursday”. The former, for me, means +3 and the latter +10. I don’t think there’s ever been a time when someone I know has said the former but implied +10.

Interesting to see so many people here who do interpret it that way.

In my area it's fairly common to say, for example, "X happens every Thursday. Do you want to go this Thursday or next Thursday?" which is equivalent to +3 versus +10.

Same with my wife; she tells apart "this Thursday" and "next Thursday" in exactly the way you describe. I don't. Predictably, all sorts of confusions ensue.

That kind of ambiguity is everywhere, though. If it's Friday, and I say "next Monday", those two days are close enough that you may need clarification - do I mean "this coming Monday" or "the Monday after that". Or another example for day 1 = Monday, if on Sunday I said "let's do that next week", you may need the same form of clarification.

I don’t see any ambiguity in “next Monday”. It literally is saying the next day which is Monday.

“Next week” on a Sunday is ambiguous because some people consider the new week to have started while others consider it to start the next day.

Human speech doesn't often work on just the literal meanings of words though, hence the ambiguity. Very very rarely at 10PM on a Sunday night does anyone mean "tomorrow" when they say "See you at the club next Monday". They usually don't mean that because we have the word "tomorrow" and that's more precise.

Likewise, on a Friday afternoon most people (in my experience) don't say "Hey we're having a cook out next Sunday, want to come?" and mean the Sunday in exactly two days. Again, because the phrase "this Sunday" is available and more precise.

In fact, I think in my experience "next X" almost always implies a full 7 days between now and the X. If my boss on Monday says "we need this in production next Friday" I don't normally take that to mean "we need this in production in the next 4 days.

There's a real ambiguity, but it isn't in the examples you gave.

It's the case of saying "next Tuesday" on a Thursday, and meaning that no Tuesdays will pass before the date in question, versus saying "next Thursday" on a Tuesday, where a Thursday will happen before the date.

That's because on Thursday, "this Tuesday" has already happened. But sometimes people will be thinking of "Tuesday after next" when they say "next Tuesday" on a Thursday, because they mean "the Tuesday after the coming Tuesday" and not "the Tuesday of next week".

Both cases are still ambiguous because even though “this” Tuesday has already passed on Thursday, no one gets confused when you say “I’m having a cook out this Tuesday, want to come?” because the future tense of the sentence automatically excludes the Tuesday in the current week which has already passed.

Since “next Tuesday” also puts the sentence context into the future, the ambiguity exists around whether it means “Tuesday in 5 days” or “Tuesday in 12 days”

If no such ambiguity existed, we wouldn’t need common phrases like “this coming Tuesday” which clarifies the speaker is talking about the “next Tuesday with no other Tuesday’s in between”

Amusingly I don’t think there’s much ambiguity around “the Tuesday after next” as a phrase even though it should be equally ambiguous, but I’ve never heard that phrase to mean “3 Tuesdays from now”

> I don’t see any ambiguity in “next Monday”. It literally is saying the next day which is Monday.

But when communicating with other people, it matters what they understand. And I've come across enough people who don't use "next Monday" like that to understand the word "next" means trouble.

Almost universally meant to mean in the next 6 days. Next week implies after 7 days.

This isn't almost universal, in fact it's generally understood not to be the case, some of the time.

If I say "next Wednesday" on Thursday, I mean the Wednesday of next week, not "this Wednesday" which was yesterday.

"Next Weekday" of a weekday that's yet to happen, means one week after that day within this week.

"Next Weekday" of a weekday that already happened, means the very next instance of that day in the calendar, "This Weekday" refers to the past.

"Hey, this Tuesday was your presentation right? How did it go?"

"We rescheduled for next Monday actually". <- this is obviously the Monday after the coming weekend.

You're right. I intuitively know and follow what you're saying, but I didn't put it into words correctly.

Slightly confused - don’t your two sentences contradict each other?

Edit: also on a Friday, you can say next week and mean Monday (3 days later)

Sorry I read your post incorrectly. If I say, let's do something this week, it means up to and including Sunday. If I say next week, it means after the upcoming Sunday.

That makes sense for places where the week starts with Monday, but I guess this week means up to and including Saturday for Americans if it's actually normal that the week starts with Sunday.

I was always under the impression that Americans basically agreed on that the week started on Monday, that the weekend ended with Sunday and that next week meant after Sunday. I thought Sunday as the first day in American calendars was a "yeah, it's stupid we do it like that, but I guess that is how it used to be back in the days" kind of thing.

I disagree with the sibling poster. Your first paragraph is correct.

The week starts on Sunday. The weekend ends on Sunday. It only makes sense if you consider two adjoining endpoints of previous weeks to be one "weekend", which I've never known anyone not to do without thinking about it.

Someone talking at work might mean something different, but I don't usually hear "next week" to mean Monday-Sunday in general conversation and we'd probably clarify for Sunday anyway.

If someone says "The week of the 15th" and Sunday is the 15th, they mean the seven days from 15-21 not the seven days of 9-15.

"Next week, maybe Sunday" means the next calendar Sunday as in Sunday-Saturday, not the Sunday after that as in Monday-Sunday.

Anyone who says otherwise is selling calendars with a Monday start of the week. :)

Your 2nd paragraph is correct. No one actually thinks about when the week starts, it's almost universally understood to be Monday based even if the calendar says Sunday based.

The answer is the same on Saturday as on Sunday, so that doesn't really matter.

The ones I see always starts with Monday, but we all have to configure every single peace of software that comes from USA to show it as such.

No. It starts from the creation story where creation starts on Sunday and ends on Friday and then the seventh day (Saturday) is the day of rest - the sabbath.

You are thinking of how Jesus is said to resurrect on the first day of the week (I.e., Sunday) and later that becomes the Sabbath day for (most) Christians.

Thank you for the additional detail about the origin of Sunday as a sabbath, and the nuance that it’s not observed on Sunday by all Christians. I was not actually thinking about the resurrection story, or even about how Sunday came to be observed as such, but it led to some interesting reading.

I've found it hard to search for details of this aspect of labor history because results are almost entirely about the movement for, and details of, what came after: the 8 hour workday. But my understanding is still that Sunday was historically the conventional rest day in the US (at least for workers who could enjoy a rest day at all), regardless of the history of the traditional Jewish/pre-Christian/Restorationist sabbath observed on Saturday. The best source I’ve found so far[1] doesn’t explicitly say so, but does strongly suggest that Saturday came later as a recognized day off because the competing “weekend” equivalent spanned Sunday–Monday (I’m also fascinated to have learned about Saint Monday). I’m sure there are other sources to find, but I’m going to leave it here to enjoy the remainder of my rest day/weekend/first day of the week.

1: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200117-the-modern-phe...

Weeks are always displayed as beginning on Sunday in the US (I get confused and annoyed when a calendar app is improperly localized for en_US and shows weeks as starting on Monday).

Separately, we call Saturday and Sunday “the weekend”. Yes, these two facts are logically inconsistent, but we live with it and I have never observed it causing any difficulty in practice.

The concept of weekend is quite a recent development.

https://youtu.be/zhfpBW-nUWk

The concept of Sunday as the first day of the week dates back thousands of years.

Why is this important? Maybe it was, but the ISO standard now is that Sunday is the last day of the week.

I was responding to the post above mine and not to the topmost post.

Obviously Sunday is the left end of the week, Saturday the right.

If that's the case then surely it should be called the "weekends" plural rather than just "weekend" singular. :P

Think of it like bookend: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bookend

The way I've always thought it was meant to be is that the "weekend" is really the "week ends," meaning start and end, the same way a shoelace has 2 ends.

The american weekend is sat-sun. Work week starts on the second day of the week. Because reasons.

“Weekend” in the US typically refers to Saturday / Sunday.

Monday through Friday is the workweek.

That was my point, if the workweek in US is Monday through Friday, and US weekend is Saturday and Sunday, there's NO REASON WHATSOEVER to call Sunday "the first day of the week"...

It's biblical. Saturday is the sabbath, the 7th day rest day, which would make sunday the first day. Later, christians decided to hold mass on sunday instead, because it was when Jesus resurrected. Eventually you end up with saturday and sunday as rest days, even though one is biblically the first and one is biblically the last day of the week. But both are the "weekend".

Think of it as "weekends" as in the limits of the week not "weekend" as in the last part of the week.

In SMWTTFS the Saturday and Sunday are at the ends as in limits of the week, and furthermore it makes sense for there to be two "weekend" days like there are two bookends. In MWTTFSS Sunday is the only actual end of the week with Saturday being included just because(?) and Monday being "weekbegin", which isn't really a word in English.

So based on this SMWTTFS seems more logical and sensible at least in English.

Why would I think of a weekend not as a weekend but as weekendS, which is 2 days, one of which is the end and another is beginning? It's called weekend, as in the end which follows the week. Which therefore starts on Monday and ends on Sunday.

I mean I get it that Sunday being the first day of the week is a leftover from religious past but this does not make it any more logical when applied to the workweek/weekend cadence. Moreover, most of European countries where workweek starts on Monday already consider it the 1st day of the week, why can't US do the same and be done with it?

> Moreover, most of European countries where workweek starts on Monday already consider it the 1st day of the week, why can't US do the same and be done with it?

What benefit would we get from doing so? Metric I can understand the benefits of, though I also see why Americans are resistant implementing such a disruptive change in daily life. But shifting our definition of the week by one day provides no benefit that I can see, nor does keeping it the way it is cause any harm. The primary argument I’ve seen in these threads is “because the word ‘weekend’ doesn’t make sense,” but that’s not very convincing to me since I and every other American I know find the phrasing perfectly natural—and if we want to make the English vocabulary perfectly ‘logical’ and ‘consistent,’ there are far more disturbing malapropisms in common use to tackle first.

The year also starts and ends with winter. The day starts and ends with night. So growing up it seemed to fit that the week would start and end with weekend.

There are many reasons to call Sunday the first say of the week. Mostly historical ones. Weeks have existed for far longer than the US or in fact any modern country has. Or the concept of a 5-day work week, in fact. The Monday as the first day of the week is modern revisionism.

There’s no reason whatsoever (other than historical) for any of the inconsistencies explored in the tweet thread. Why should the start of the week be any different?

The five day workweek is a fairly new thing (early to mid 20th century); the day numbering thing is much older.

No reason other than some 6000-7000 years of record keeping by Hebrews, tracking the 7th day.

The Hebrew calendar kept changing as they moved and adapted the calendar designed by the ruler of the lands.

Hebrew words for the week came from Akkadian and sabbath itself can be traced back to the Babylonian loan word for fifteen..mistaken as seven. šabattu is the 15th day of the month, the time of the full moon Vs “sebūtu“ was the 7th day of the lunar quarter.

The Akkadians had no concept of ‘week’. They simply followed the moon. Starting with the new moon, first quarter, second quarter and third quarter. Their festivals were based on the 1, 7 etc and 15 day with the 15th day being observed as the bright full moon.

It must have been from the Babylonians that the Hebrews adopted the 7 day week because they had seen them celebrate the 7th day, “sebūtu“. Altho they probably chose the word for the 15th day/full moon of Babylonian šabattu as it’s closer to Hebrew ‘sabbot’ and their word for ‘rest’. Post exile Hebrews took this to create the Hebrew calender and created sabbot as the 7th day of rest.

The Babylonians celebrated 1, 7, 21 and 28th day after new moon as the beginning of each quarter. Hebrews simply took each quarter to be a slice of time instead of differentiating between the four quarters between two new moons.

I’ve seen this theory proposed, but is it actually widely accepted by historians? Wikipedia says that a connection “has been suggested”[0], which doesn’t seem like very strong wording.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabbat

Yes..it was proposed by a linguist, iirc. There is only one 2015 paper where I have read it. But it seems most plausible. Consider this. The Greeks had no calender. Cannanite Hebrews had no Egyptian admixture. So what remains is the sandwich period from where the record keeping must have been directly influenced by the Babylonians.

> Hebrew words for the week came from Akkadian

The days in Hebrew are simply numbered, First day, Second day etc. except for Shabbat