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From: Aidan Kehoe <kehoea@parhasard.net>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Next ambiguity
Date: Sun, 21 Jul 2024 19:50:56 +0100
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 Ar an chéad lá is fiche de mí Iúil, scríobh Athel Cornish-Bowden: 

 > I'm wondering how common ambiguity in the word "next" is. My first wife, when I
 > was driving and she was giving directions, would say, for example, "take the
 > next right", which we would understand differently; for me the next right would
 > mean right at the intersection we are just coming to. For her it meant the one
 > after it. There was a similar ambiguity for weeks. If I say "next week" I mean
 > the week that starts tomorrow, Monday 22nd July: for her it would mean the week
 > that starts on the 29th.
 > 
 > In case it's relevant, I mention that my ex-wife is from California, one of the
 > few native adult Californians that I ever came across when I lived in
 > California.

I think she was just wrong. “This right” vs “next right” is a useful
distinction to have, and she didn’t have it. This ignores the
what-is-the-first-day-of-the-week other ambiguity of your second example.

An awkward thing to look into for evidence, even in these days of large
corpora.

-- 
‘As I sat looking up at the Guinness ad, I could never figure out /
How your man stayed up on the surfboard after fourteen pints of stout’
(C. Moore)