This title bounces off my brain too, and I did some thinking about why.
The sentence “Friday’s far enough for milk” is obviously a shortened version of a longer sentence. There are a few ways the brain might try to fill in that longer sentence, and mine does something like this:
“Friday is far enough from now that buying milk is worth it”. This is weird: Does this imply that if Friday were closer to now, then buying milk wouldn’t be worth it anymore? The whole point is that milk is relevant on a Friday-like time scale, and Friday is close enough to now that buying milk is therefore worth it. So I think that this is where the primary confusion comes from: the most straightforward fill-in of the sentence (at least to my brain) leads to the opposite of its intended meaning.
The real sentence-extension goes like “Friday is far enough for humans to survive to make buying milk now worth it”. The whole “humans and surviving” part is crucial: if your brain doesn’t fill that part in immediately from context, then your reading of the sentence will be wrong. Friday is not the thing that is far enough away; It’s actually the end of the world that is far enough away.
This title bounces off my brain too, and I did some thinking about why.
The sentence “Friday’s far enough for milk” is obviously a shortened version of a longer sentence. There are a few ways the brain might try to fill in that longer sentence, and mine does something like this:
“Friday is far enough from now that buying milk is worth it”. This is weird: Does this imply that if Friday were closer to now, then buying milk wouldn’t be worth it anymore? The whole point is that milk is relevant on a Friday-like time scale, and Friday is close enough to now that buying milk is therefore worth it. So I think that this is where the primary confusion comes from: the most straightforward fill-in of the sentence (at least to my brain) leads to the opposite of its intended meaning.
The real sentence-extension goes like “Friday is far enough for humans to survive to make buying milk now worth it”. The whole “humans and surviving” part is crucial: if your brain doesn’t fill that part in immediately from context, then your reading of the sentence will be wrong. Friday is not the thing that is far enough away; It’s actually the end of the world that is far enough away.