I won’t even use expressions like “next Thursday” or “this Friday” without unambiguously qualifying it, e.g. “this Friday, the 20th”.
Similarly with the other day To me, this has always meant the day before yesterday, but I often hear it being used to mean some unspecified day in the recent past. Usually it doesn’t matter much, because it’s in the past. Nobody’s going to miss a deadline or appointment the way they conceivably could with regard to ambiguously worded dates in the future, but I try to use it only in its narrower meaning.
For those who don’t know German, that language has single words meaning “the day before yesterday”, and “the day after tomorrow”, vorgestern and übermorgen respectively.
I’ve always understood “the other day” to mean an indeterminate time in the recent past, and use it that way deliberately (when I don’t remember the precise day, or when the precise day is irrelevant). This is the first I’ve heard of it being interpreted as “the day before yesterday”.
Not true in my dialect. If it’s Sunday and you say “last Saturday,” it does not mean the Saturday yesterday, but the Saturday a week before. I would say even on Monday this would hold true, as I would say “this past Saturday” or simply “on Saturday” with a past tense verb instead of “last Saturday.” As you go further in the week, it gets more ambiguous. That’s why I end up using phrases like “next Saturday, not this Saturday but next Saturday” or, more succinctly, “Saturday next week” or even “two Saturdays from today.” Or hell, the date, but I don’t usually know the date.
It shouldn’t be this hard to communicate, but different people have different understandings of “next” and “last.” For me and many in my dialect, “next” means “next week” or “not the upcoming one, but the following one.” Others are more literal, and “next Saturday” means the first Saturday you run into from today, even if it’s a day or two before.“Last” is similar.
Yeah, I have never heard the expression specifically refer to the day before yesterday. What’s your dialect area @Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus ? Even the dictionaries I’ve checked say it means “A few days ago; recently.”
For me, the literal meaning of “the other day” is “the day before yesterday”. It can also be used more loosely to mean an unspecified day in the recent past (but not yesterday, I guess).
Japanese can go one better. Not only does it have words for “the day before yesterday” - 一昨日 ototoi and “the day after tomorrow” - 明後日 asatte, it also has “the day after the day after tomorrow” - 明々後日 shiasatte.
What’s interesting is that dictionary.com says “the other day” originally meant either the day previous or the day following (i.e. yesterday and tomorrow.)
For you, what is the literal meaning of “literal”? Wouldn’t the literal meaning be “any day but this day”?
It could certainly vary depending on where you are, but the online dictionaries I consulted all define “the other day” as “a few days ago” or “recently,” which agrees with my understanding/usage. I’d add that the non-specificity is a feature, not a bug: I’d use “the other day” in situations where either I didn’t remember or it didn’t matter exactly which day I was referring to.
Interesting. I also had never heard that meaning. I only knew the meaning of “an unspecified day in the recent past” – could be anywhere from yesterday to a couple of weeks ago, and carries an implication that the speaker doesn’t know exactly what day it was and doesn’t think it matters.
That was exactly my reaction to your comment. “Other than what?” Other than the day we were just talking about, or today if no other day has been explicitly mentioned.
A quick search throws up no support for my understanding. I actually remember as a child being told that was what the phrase means - I will ask my father what he understands it to mean.
I will admit my use of the word “literal” was a poor choice. What I meant (and it appears I may be wrong about this) is that the narrow, strict, or precise idiomatic meaning was X but there is also a looser and equally valid idiomatic meaning of Y.
One tangential point: there is a close relationship between the words for “other” and “second” in Indo-European languages. In modern Lithuanian, the same word antras means both “other” and “second”, and this was historically the case in Latin (alter) and Germanic (annar).
Of course, that just means that that is what the phrase meant to the person who told you that. And their understanding of that meaning might have been a personal idiosyncracy, or it might have been common to everyone in that part of the world. Or, depending on what you remember, they might have been telling you that that was what the phrase meant in that specific instance (e.g. “when I said I stepped in dog poop the other day, I meant that it happened on Wednesday, which was the day before yesterday”) and you misinterpreted them to mean that that was what the phrase means in general.
Yes, everything you’ve said here is correct and a real possibility. Fortunately the person in question is still alive and I will take the opportunity to ask him when I meet him overmorrow.
To my understanding, the English phrase “the other day” has the same scope as the Irish phrase “an lá faoi deireadh”. Could be anything from about a week ago to the day before yesterday, but not yesterday.
To my understanding, it can include “yesterday” if I don’t specifically mean “yesterday”. For example, I might say “the other day” about something that may have happened yesterday or the day before or the day before that but I don’t remember which specific day. It’s basically another way of saying " Sometime in the last few days".
I never encountered any other meaning for it. I wouldn’t consider limited to even a few days. Or that something ever really happened on that unnamed day.
I’d say that it’s probably not yesterday, because if it were, I’d probably have said “yesterday” instead of “the other day”, but there’s still the possibility that I don’t remember if it was yesterday or the day before.
Wouldn’t the literal meaning be “any day but this day”?