The most intuitive answer is if you translated the two times i into two different sin wave where all 12 time periods would fit into a sin wave whole cycle the earlier time would be “leading” which makes sense if they were pushed
this isn’t intuitive
The reason my mind thought of this is that as unintuitive as it sounds, leading and lagging are both unintuitive concepts when hearing them initially and it’s easy to get them mixed up because it seems backwards
Pushing and Pulling both being backwards would make sense from this perspective as well, english has a habit of doing things backwards but everyone understands what it means anyway
you don’t say push it ahead you say push it back
it’s significantly clearer
Well that’s what they said
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Okay, but what about pushing it back then?
Wait I misread
ya but theyre wrong
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like if i say “im gonna go get mcdonalds” and then pick up burger king the phrase “im gonna go get mcdonalds” isnt inconsistent I just used it wrong
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Nya
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Do you think the therm “whale” fits you
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copium amount of earwax (im the same)
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If you say “I’m gonna get a coke” and get a Pepsi, you’d call that wrong, probably, I don’t know where you live
But if you said that in the US South you wouldn’t be using it wrong, that’s how the phrase is used, most people have a common understanding that a “coke” means a soda of any brand, it’s inconsistent
If there’s a substantial enough group of people who have a different and common (as in shared) understanding of a phrase they’re “using wrong”, it starts actually being “used right”, as it successfully communicates a thing
If there’s a contingent of people as large as 30% who understand something completely different by a phrase you’re using, I think that’s not “using it wrong”, that’s it being inconsistent
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Like I can accept “30% of people use this phrase wrong” in the case of technical vocabulary or similar situations where there’s a precise thing that a certain group of highly-informed people mean by a phrase, and the people “using it wrong” are not the group primarily using this vocabulary. That’s a situation where it’s like, okay, fine, these people are using the phrase that way out of a lack of information on the subject
But in the case of something simple and common like time, I think if 30% of people hear the opposite thing when you say something, that is an inconsistent phrase and you probably shouldn’t use it in cases where you want to avoid ambiguity
No group of people has an “objective” claim to being correct about metaphors between time and space IMO. Somebody could just as easily hold and justify the same opinion by comparing it to a different set of phrases
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I could argue:
- In English, the future is generally considered to be “ahead” of you, and the past is considered to be “behind” you. When you say something is coming up, when it’s in the future, you say it’s “ahead”. Pushing something further “ahead” would therefore mean pushing it even further into the future, and rescheduling it for 7PM
- When you push an event “back” an hour, that means moving it to a later time, and “ahead” is the opposite of “back”. Therefore, pushing something “ahead” is the opposite of pushing it “back”, and therefore it’d mean it’s rescheduled for 5PM
I don’t think either of these arguments is objectively wrong, I think somebody could justify their use of the phrase in either of these ways and it’d make sense. There’s no counter to say “okay but that argument is invalid”, there’s just… two different valid interpretations of the phrase. I don’t think you can say the phrase is being used wrong
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That being said, despite the fact that I think the objectively correct answer is “it’s inconsistent” having seen the poll results, I wanted to learn what people thought of the phrase before now, not what was objectively True. The fact that you thought the phrase was unambiguous one way is still, like, the answer I wanted to hear. The “it’s inconsistent” option was for people who already thought it was inconsistent before discussing it with other people
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Brb creating a ministry of truth
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Hey that post was literally me saying “even though I think you’re technically wrong that’s actually what I wanted you to say, not the ‘technically correct’ thing”
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That’s the one post where I’m NOT correcting YBW