When weekdays turn to weekends
I’m sure you’ve said it before, and probably perfectly reasonably so. Given the nearness of Memorial Day, perhaps you’ve even said it recently. You know the difference between single days and multiple, consecutive days. But somehow, English lets us do things like it. It happens to all well-meaning people.
Next Friday is a holiday weekend in the US of A (link) First Friday of every month unless that Friday is a holiday weekend, then it is on 2nd Friday It is held at the church. (link) Friday is a pay weekend, and I have this feeling in my bones that it is going to be a wild one. (link) Moreover, Monday is a three-day weekend in the United States, and large price movements in the stock typically come immediately before or after such holidays. (link
[afterthought: After some further consideration, there is also: page 290 is a new chapter. Maybe others?]
Isn’t this just synecdoche?
To me sure, this is an example of synecdoche, though not without some twists. For instance, what about this coming Friday is Memorial Day weekend? That’s actually the sentence that first caught my attention. And it was said by someone who works 9-5 on Fridays, so the “weekend” (= time off?) doesn’t really start until late on Friday. That would then be whole-for-part metonymy (the part of Friday after 5 being expressed simply as “Friday”), as well as part-for-whole (”Friday” equated with the entire weekend).
And like all such things, it is not fully general. Page 290 could be a new chapter, but not if it isn’t near the beginning of the chapter. OTOH, page 290 could be chapter fourteen without any restrictions on its chapter-internal location.
Coming from an amateur, I suspect something when what is considered by me (and probably any secretary in my office) merely an incorrect construction by someone temporarily ignorant of the difference between a day and a weekend is interpreted as an example of some linguistic category. Oh well, the language changes, and I guess what is wrong today is an acceptable expression when enough people adopt it - but not before that!
Well, in fact when I first heard this particular construction I also was struck by how strange it seemed. I was only on some thought (and Google searches) that I started to believe that it wasn’t so horrible. What interesting is that the “friday = weekend” equation is so much like other, well-studied constructions that are perfectly normal (or at least, often-used by respectable writers). As The Ridger pointed out, this is an example of synecdoche, which I take to be a type of metonymy. Metonymy is, roughly, where one can refer to an entire scene or complex concept by simply naming a salient subpart of it; or, where one can refer to one subpart of a scene by naming another subpart. (Or, in fact, one can refer to a part of the scene by naming the whole thing; in the right theoretical framework all of these things can be captured with a single formula)
Some examples: I read Faulkner all through High School (Faulkner = works by Faulkner), The White House has announced today that it will not deal with Pyongyang (Washington = spokesperson who announces, also government officials who deal with foreign powers; Pyongyang = governing officials of North Korea), I picked up a Dell the other day (Dell = product made by Dell), and so forth. So, one can refer to books by naming the author, to governments by naming seats of government, and to products by naming producers. In each of these we have a complex scene (writing a book, governing a nation-state, producing an item), and we can talk about one part of the scene by naming another part of it.
The weekday-for-weekend metonymy is something I wasn’t familiar with, and indeed, finding examples of it is rather hard. It’s much less common than, say, “White House” for “US Government.” So just because it fits in the general idea of metonymy doesn’t mean it’s the most regular thing to say. But, conversely, precisely because it is part of this general idea of metonymy, it will no doubt gain strength and acceptability by virtue of being in good company.
Except that Friday isn’t even part of the weekend; it’s the last day of the week before the weekend begins.
You mean you’ve never finished word on Friday and thought, “finally, the weekend”?
But seriously, it is odd (or “interesting”) that the speaker of that sentence seems to have thought that Friday was the weekend. I’ve got no clue why, other than a sort of “getting ahead of one’s self”.
Possibly they were referring to the widespread practice (well, it’s widespread where I work) of taking the Friday beginning a three-day weekend off.
Or depending on the context, referring to a probable effect on the traffic leaving town that Friday afternoon. I probably said something very like that when sitting dead still on the Parkway at Powdermill Road: “Well, this is Memorial Day…”