SubJeff on 9/10/2008 at 07:50

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QFT

demagogue on 9/10/2008 at 08:01

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TBH, to completely contradict the spirit of my last post, when it comes to the meaning of words -- unless you're doing law/science and using a term of art -- aside from those cases, I'm with good old Wittgenstein in thinking a word is as a word does.

The only thing that matters is what most people mean in the various situations in which they use it. So it all comes down to the context. If it's in the context of going out, or leaving for home for a holiday, then "weekend" usually includes Friday night (if it's a holiday, you can even have a "long weekend" that might include Thursday night or Monday). If it's in the context of something like days you don't have to go to work or school, any situation where you could draw an X on a calender, or the actual boxes on a calender that have a bold outline, then it's just Sat & Sun. You'd have to go context by context if you wanted to totally diagram it (which is why computer parsing of nat'l language is a bitch), and W might say it's basically acting like two different words in different contexts (which is why you have to clarify what you mean when you mix contexts). That's basically like asking your gf which "weekend" does she mean, the one that includes Friday night or not? Or, maybe a little more helpfully, which context does she mean ... going out or days you get off work?

"Technical" vs. "practical" is a sort of nutshell way to draw the line maybe (or more like "practical for calenders" vs "practical for hanging out"), but if you want to be really anal/pedantic about it (and let's face it, when you'd rather post a poll to a chat forum full of video game nerds than just look it up in a dictionary, you might be that kind of person ;) ), then you'd probably have to go to some sociolinguistic study that looked at the word's use over 100s of people over years of time in a ton of different situations and draw a map of exactly how the line was usually split over all those situations. Yuck! What's amazing, though, is how our mind does all of that automatically.

d0om on 9/10/2008 at 09:27

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The Sabbath day is Saturday, bizarrely. This is when Jews have the day of rest. I have no idea where the Christian tradition of Sunday being the day of rest came from.

Friday night is the start of the weekend, as long as you party until after midnight!

SubJeff on 9/10/2008 at 09:53

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The second of the 2 Ten Commandments that many Christian (umbrella) religions break. The first being the worship of idols.

I think it was some divisive measure cooked up by churches in Europe many moons ago.

SD on 9/10/2008 at 11:19

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It dates from when Constantine created modern Christianity, by merging St Paul's Jesus cult and the pagan Imperial cult of Sol Invictus into a single entity.