http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kw54-rCIrPs

letting the days go by….

I think people seeing forward as moving later (this includes myself) are used to working with the timelines and gantt charts common in a corporate office.

so to me, not only does forward = later… it also means to the right!

I have no love (or use) for corporate linguistics (I find them mostly repellant, and am never in that environment), but the action of bringing forward and pushing back, meaning sooner and later, respectively, is entirely logical and correct to my brain.

Felix Mitchell @28 says it perfectly, for me. It isn’t about timelines, it’s about people describing plannable time (the future) in natural, physical metaphors.

So, no timeline, there is only the future before us, and we push away from us (later, into the future) or pull forward to us (sooner, out of the future).

For me, there are no mental gymnastics or linguistic perversions involved.

Stormy: Take that, subspace!

Dr. Quinn: Shut up.

Stormy: No

Apparently you haven’t been to any of the Town Hall meetings about health care reform then.

#34, no one really understands day light savings time.

As for the original question, I first thought it was Friday as others had because I assumed that today was Wednesday and the meeting couldn’t be moved to the past.

Really I think it’s just a poorly worded question that you could take either way if you assumed something wrong like I did. The better way would be to say “The meeting originally scheduled for Wednesday has been moved to Monday.”

But, I have made this mistake before so I would see when my coworkers were going to be there and that’s when I would go too.

If a meeting has been pushed back 2 days from Monday, I would think it would then be on Friday. Pushed back would mean pushed away from me – not 24 hours but 48 hours away.

This conundrum has always felt like the whole up hill/down hill thing. It’s all down hill from here, to me means things are going to get easier. It’s all uphill from here means things are getting harder. I do know that not everyone thinks this way.

For example, when a project deadline slips, I hear people talk about deployment being pushed back, not moved forward.

I never thought of moving from Wednesday to Monday as a way of moving forward in time, but I guess you’re right.

I thought it was some kind of ‘insert two days’(Thursday and Friday) between Wednesday and the meeting, and, skipping the non-working weekend, they arrive at Monday.

I assumed Monday, since common speech would be, “Bring the meeting forward”.
At no point did I stop to consider whether I was talking about the meeting as being moved forward in the time dimension vs. the meeting as a 4D object moved forward in my direction.

Interesting – All of my programming coworkers immediately responded with Friday.

My issue with the study is that there is no causal relationship to justify the inferences of your temperament based on the respondent’s philosophy of time perception. A colleague had an interesting (and possibly somewhat cynical) take on one potential association with temperament. His reasoning:

People who have spent time in the corporate world assume that a meeting is never rescheduled earlier. Knowing full well that this question was posed ambiguously, they omit the term “forward” and think strictly in terms of the future. Therefore it may be not that people who have a “you moving time” philosophy are angrier, but rather people who have been subjected to corporate culture are angrier.

I think I prefer this interpretation the most, if only because it is humorously consoling.

Seems to me that the way you normally think about the flow of time could have a great impact on your general outlook.

Here’s a test: let’s say a meeting, originally scheduled for Wednesday, has been moved forward two days. What is the new day of the meeting? If you think it’s Monday, you think of time as something that passes by you. If you think it’s Friday, you imagine time as something you move through.

Seeing “Monday” first can help prime the disambiguation of what “moved forward” means.

Incidentally, in Mandarin, 一前 (yi qian) means “earlier” or “past” — but also “in front of” — which sounds like crazy-talk in English, since things in the past are supposed to be “behind you”. …Except, the English word “before” does the same thing: “before” in time is behind you, “before” in space is in front of you.

It’s a miracle that anyone (even claims to) understands what anyone else is talking about.

I just did, to my housemate, like this: Next week, you have a meeting. It is moved forward two days. What day is the meeting on?

He answered Monday.

I find no credence with the presumption that a “meeting is never rescheduled earlier”, I’m afraid. So can only presume it is one of those things, that commonly gets interpreted differently. A binary issue.

We talk about meetings in relation to ourselves, not to a time line. That’s why it’s ‘push’ back, and ‘bring’ forward.

Moving forward in time is not the same as moving forward in relation to us (in the present).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aymara_language#Unique_features

#14: Pratchett’s Discworld trolls have such a backwards idea of time. He may well have poached the concept from someone else though, that is his style.

If someone tells me on Wednesday or later that the meeting was “moved forward 2 days,” I’ll assume Monday. If they tell me on Tuesday or earlier, I’ll assume Friday (unless it’s Monday, in which case I’ll read from their level of tension whether they mean today or five days from now).

Keep in mind I deal with lawyers who give me EXTREMELY URGENT directions to move terabytes of data to “different memory,” and I don’t have the luxury of asking “do you mean a different harddrive, different RAM chips, or a different server?”

This was discussed at the meeting. You were not there. I drank your milkshake.

More substantially, both usages make me want to beat the speaker to death with a 2×4. I guess you could call me angry?