Nefarious Phannie Void

Okay hi, now that I have your attention, here's the linguistic theory behind this (because yes, there is theory, this isn't just some random misunderstanding on phil's part, this has been studied).

To keep it very short, in English there are two perceptions of time (Dan actually kind of got that right in the podcast):

moving-time:  we are stationary and time moves along us (like a conveyor belt) -> if something is moved forward (in the direction of the movement of time) it happens earlier

moving-ego: time is stationary (like a road) and we move along it -> if something is moved forward (in the direction of our movement) it happens later (McGlone & Harding, 1998)

Why is this relevant? Because that shows that there isn’t really a right or wrong, it genuinely is linguistically ambiguous.

What I was mainly interested in was how a) the native language of participants and b) for English native speakers the home country affects how you understand that phrase.

Alright, let’s get into it.

The main question asked was: “What do you personally think "moving an appointment forward" means?”

With the options:

The appointment is preponed (it happens earlier than planned).

The appointment is postponed (it happens later than planned).

I’m not sure

Results - English

(Note: the percentages you can see are for within the rows, to showcase the differing opinions within the language (or country in this case))

I got by far the most responses from US and UK English speakers (apologies to the not explicitly listed English speaking countries, that's fully on me trying to make that form in like 20 minutes, I didn't expect that many responses lol).

US-Americans are more split on this than people from the UK. This is interesting in that dnp are, well, British, so the most interesting number for their context specifically is the 85% of UK English speakers that would disagree with them and say that "moving sth forward" means it's earlier.

Australians on the other hand seem to agree much more on what that phrase means, but there were also significantly less participants.

Not shown in this table but also interesting is that 9% (10 participants) of US-Americans said they hadn’t heard that phrase before. Only one other English native speaker outside the US picked that option. Filtering out the responses of those people only minorly changes the result of the question above.

There has been an experiment on this phenomenon specifically that found that English native speakers tend to favour the moving-time perspective (McGlone & Harding, 1998), which is in line with the results of this study. However, the methodology of that study isn’t comparable with this one (it may surprise you, but they didn’t just haphazardly throw a badly thought through form at people) + it’s from almost 30 years ago. So it’s nice to see that at least the tendency of our data is the same, although our results appear to show a stronger lean towards the moving time perspective.

Some general sentiments from the comments:

You should always clarify what the new time is.

“Moving forward” reminds of moving the time forward for daylight savings.

No one says “move forward” just use “move up”.

“Move forward” is very clearly earlier???

Just fucking clarify the new time

Other languages

The results of participants with a native language other than English were 4% for “not sure”, 42% for “later” and 54% for “earlier” with 76 responses in total. However, those percentages don’t really tell us much because the responses were fairly heterogeneous between different languages and much more homogenous within the languages. That’s why I split the results into four groups.

If there was any background info given that is specific to the native language, I put them under the respective tables (+ some results from a review paper that I found (Feist & Duffy, 2023))

Languages with at least 2 participants that largely (>75%) agree that forward means earlier

German:

“This seems to be a common thing in other languages but I never experienced any confusion when someone in Germany said that a Termin must be moved forward. We would say. Der Termin muss nach vorne verschoben werden.“

One notable thing about German in this survey is that (after English) it is the language with by far the most responses and all 19 of them agree. This is in line with previous studies (compiled in that review paper) that show that up 95% of Germans think that way.

Languages with at least 2 participants that largely (>75%) agree that forward means later

Spanish:

“In English I would 100% assume it means move an hour later, but thinking about it, in Spanish we say "adelantar la cita" which literally means "move the appointment forward" and it does mean moving it earlier”

“in spanish "mover [un evento] para más adelante" (to move an event forward) means to postpone but "adelantar [un evento]" means to prepone.”

Swedish:

“I think i'm influenced by how we express things in my native language here. Moving an event forward usually means forwards in time (so later), we would say "we'll put this earlier/meet earlier" or something”

A study cited in that review paper supports this and showed that 80% of Swedish speakers have this linguistic perspective on time.

Languages with mixed responses

Dutch:

“I guess the English translation of the Dutch saying is 'were bringing/pulling it forward' which language wise paints a more 'moving something closer to you' picture. Similar when an appointment is being postponed one talks about pushing something away. So I guess the image that the words used provoques make it so that's hard to misunderstand which way the meeting is going.”

A note on that from the review paper mentioned above which explains our results pretty perfectly and that I am citing very incorrectly:

“Belgian speakers of Dutch tended to adopt the Moving Ego and Moving Time perspectives at chance levels in response to the construction voorwaarts verplaatst (moved forward), speakers of Dutch from the Netherlands tended to prefer the Moving Time perspective in response to another translation of the probe, naar voren verplaatst.”

Finnish:

“I dont think we in finnish have this saying quite the same. I think you can say ”siirtää eteenpäin” (move forward) but it feels weird idk if anyone says that and i defo would take it as postponing but it would be strange. Usually we would say ”siirtää myöhempään/aikaisempaan” (move for later/for earlier) or ”siirtää lähemmäksi/kauemmaksi” (move closer/farther). I can see both ways but personally to me forward is linearly to further from me.”

Languages with only 1 response

Mandarin Chinese:

Not listed but also interesting:

“grew up bilingual eng/mandarin chi - it might be ambiguous in english but in mandarin it's a lot clearer, we say things like "2 weeks front" (literal translation) to mean "2 weeks ago/before" or "one year behind" for a year later. also i advocate for just saying what the new date/time is”

Again, this is in line with a study that showed that 85% of Mandarin Chinese speakers adopt the moving time perspective (aka forward = earlier).

Language families

Because there were only so few responses for many languages I tried to look if there were any patterns within language families.

Slavic: Slovak,Russian, Polish: 86% (6 votes): later; 14% (1 vote): earlier

Semitic: Arabic, Hebrew: 100% later (3 votes)

Within all other language families (Romance, Germanic, Uralic, Indo-Aryan) there weren’t any clear patterns. Plus, special shoutout to Malay, Tamil and Turkish that didn’t have any close language relatives (from what I could find in my brief Wikipedia research at least).

If you have any insight on any other languages, please sound off in the tags/add to this post! I'm very curious to hear more about that.

Oh god there is more

I also asked if people had worked in a corporate setting before. If you filter out the people that haven’t worked in a corporate setting the results shift slightly towards more people saying it means earlier (69 -> 74%) and for only the English ones from 75,5 -> 78%.

In conclusion

(and this sentiment was heavily echoed in the comments) you should probably just clarify the time when talking to someone instead of moving or pushing it anywhere. Especially when you’re working on an international level. But also, Phil is very clearly in the minority with thinking the way he does in the UK.

If you have made it this far you get a treat and that is a link to the google doc with all the results, including the comments. It's definitely worth looking through that. This sheet is linked to the form and will continue to be updated automatically. Feel free to download and use that data for whatever you want, just please tell me because I'm nosy.

References/further reading if you're interested

Feist, M. I., & Duffy, S. E. (2023). To each their own: A review of individual differences and metaphorical perspectives on time. Frontiers in Psychology, 14. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1213719

McGlone, M. S., & Harding, J. L. (1998). Back (or forward?) to the future: The role of perspective in temporal language comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 24(5), 1211–1223. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.24.5.1211

also sidenote that isn't really relevant to anything, but it's pretty damn cool how interested the phandom is in science! like, I'm not going to pretend this survey that i threw together in 20 min and that has a bunch of issues & my interpretation of the results as someone who has no clue about linguistics is the pinnacle of science BUT!!! people are interested in that! sooo many people participated! like i know people who write on a thesis and wish they had that many participants. so really what I'm saying is, thanks for indulging me, stay curious :]

And to end this, special shout out to my favourite comment: