4 ms·
What's messed up about "before" and "after"? I don't think native speakers will use "in front of" or "behind" to describe time coordinates. Those words are us
by harshreality 12y ago
What's messed up about "before" and "after"?
I don't think native speakers will use "in front of" or "behind" to describe time coordinates. Those words are used to describe relative positioning of events, and in such use I think they have the opposite interpretation from what you suggested.
"Event A occurred behind event B", for example, or "A is behind schedule" (although you could then argue that scheduling has its own semantics for "behind"). However, even "I'm running behind" means running late, not early.
Even on a timeline, it's not clear whether the point of perspective for determining "in front of" or "behind" is a point in the past or a point in the future.
Simple: use before and after, or earlier and later.
btw, the overall semantics of "a means b, depending on whom you are speaking to" made me cringe even though I know you meant "A usually means B, but it depends..." (which I don't think is even true—see above—but that's a factual not semantic complaint). Taken literally, you could just as easily have written "a means (not b)..."
- fixermark 12y ago"Before" and "After" are fine. "Behind" is not incorrect in the original text, but it can be terribly, frustratingly ambiguous. As you've noted, "I'm running behind" means "I'm running late," i.e. I will arrive after the correct time. But "My clock is running behind" means "My clock is running slow," meaning it shows a time before the correct time. Similarly, when projects are behind schedule (i.e. likely to complete after the correct time), we sometimes solve this by pushing the schedule back... Meaning by pushing the correct time into the future, as opposed to most contexts where "pushing something back" would mean "pushing it further behind." So we push schedules back to move deadlines forward. Personally, I usually use "into the future" and "into the past" to be precise. Treating time with spatial-positional-relative language is fraught with inaccuracies. (Fun fact: did you know "biweekly" means either "twice a week" or "once every other week?" I can't think of any other measurement unit that has a factor-of-four error built into its very definition).
- roywiggins 12y agoThere's biannual/biennial: think quick, which means twice a year and which means every two years? http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/biannual http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/biannual / http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/biennial http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/biennial
- mikeash 12y agoMisleading question, since biannual means both!