Codemasters and semantics, Vol 1. Prepositions of time

[Anarandir]

I was just wondering if I was the only one who has had some problems with CodeM player accounts and customer service, and more precisely, with their e-mails stating that "your account will be reactivated" or "your account is due to expire" or "We are sorry to inform you that your payment has not yet arrived to our database, so we cannot yet refund your xxx amount of money, but we will refund your payment in the next 3-4 days, if the next 3-4 days are not a weekend, if they are we will come back to you in a few weeks". N.B. I'm not a native speaker (If you've ever heard me speak, you'll know how far from a native speaker I am ), so my observations might be a little off, and do correct me if these definitions of the usage of certain prepositions of time in the English language are not entirely correct

My observations are the following:

FROM: Apparently this preposition is the MOST unimportant and arbitrary preposition of time. "From Monday to Thursday" might mean "On Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday" or, "On Tuesday and Wednesday" or "whenever-the-hell-we-want". This quite erratic use of FROM does not really affect anyone's life, so who cares, right? It's not as if "this road is under construction from March 2010 until April 2012" is absolute, they can start building the road on January 2011 for all I care!



UNTIL: especially as an opposite of FROM, this preposition is a real troublemaker. Whereas FROM could mean almost any day between x and y in "FROM x UNTIL y", UNTIL can mean any day after FROM! so in "FROM x UNTIL y" it could well mean z, å, ä, or ö! (On the other hand, you Anglophones don't tend to use å, ä or ö, so the difference isn't that big for you guys, but we scandinavians can get rather stressed out with all those letters after z!))

ON: now, as a non-native "speaker" of English I tend to think this one as being the most precise preposition of time, especially when talking about dates (as in 8th of March, not meeting a nice girl/boy for a cup of coffee and a movie, as we shall see later) but it seems that this is not the case. ON seems to have no precise meaning at all. "ON the 8th of March" can mean "9th of March", "10th of April" or "some time next year". But then again, when talking about dates in its other meaning (just to point out I mean actually meeting someone), especially if its a boy meeting a girl at place x. If the date has been set "let's meet at place x on the 9th at 7 p.m., ok?", "ok, see you there", and the boy accepts the CodeMian way of expressing time with prepositions, he might well be at place x on the 9th of next month. When he tries to call the girl where on earth she is, "I've been waiting for hours, where are you?", the answer is more than probably "You little (insert curse)-toot-toot-toot-toot", "I wonder what her problem is?" ( Apparently this does not apply to females, since the prepositions ON and AT mean same as "maybe, if I don't have anything better to do". Females are thus allowed to leave the male waiting due to semantics hidden from the male, and the male won't probably be even too pissed if he happens to get a pint from place x while waiting)

EDIT: Not being sexist here btw, my observations are based on a single individual, an acquaintance of mine

All right, and what was the point of all this? There is none. I just like ranting about grammar since I think (emphasis on this word) I know what I'm talking about. It would be fun to make research on the "accurateness of prepositions and social stereotypes and lenience". It's too bad I'm not an English Philology student. Oh, wait I am. Meh.

[Bardori]

Well, speaking about semantics i had a chat again with my ISP today, the reason being they shutdown several big stations last night without any warning and or infrormation. I sat on the phone for 1½ hour waiting to get some information & then finally i got ahold of someone.

Imagine my surprised when the person on the other end says that they have warned about this maintanance, i kindly ask how they warned about it and the woman says that they have sent several e-mails about it. The funny thing here is that they have sent mails about maintanance but this maintanance was assured only to affect their mail servers and it clearly stated that it had nothing to do with connections of any kind and would not interfear with general function. I then continue the conversation explaining this to her and that as a customer it's always nice to know about maintanance before it happends. Her reply was simply: well if we warn about e-mail servers being shutdown for maintanance cant you figure out that we will be shutting down connections aswell?
At that point i realised i would get nowhere and just politly asked her to have a nice day (maybe in a somewhat snidy tone...)

So the heads up we got said one thing and it did so in very specific terms saying that only one thing would be affected and nothing else. However the intention from their side was that their customers would realise that all their services would be affected and they should therefor feel warned about it....

These sort of things seem to get more and more common as the years go by and personally i've stopped getting upset about it, the more communication we have in todays society the worse we get at actually communicating with eachother.

[Anarandir]

Ouch Bard, that's customer service for you x/