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First Day Of The Week?

mikfez

Generally Bewildered
Joined
Aug 17, 2006
Messages
497
Location
East Yorkshire
I've just put up our 2019 kitchen calendar which will have all out appointments etc. on it and the bastards have started the week on Sunday.
This has seriously screwed up January as I started filling in stuff and then realised that their week didn't start on Monday as the days are over the top of the grid and not on each individual day.
So when does the week start?
 
I have always thought of Sunday as the last day of the week. After all, in the Bible, God rested on the 7th day - which is Sunday, because that is the 'sabbath' day.
But...if you're Jewish, the sabbath day is Saturday, which makes Sunday the first day of the week.
Take your pick!
 
In traditional British Catholic/Anglican/Episcopalian households, despite the 'resting on the seventh day' aspect, Sunday seems to be treated as the first day of the week. An older generation observance?

Conversely, in Reformation/Protestant/Non-Conformist (and atheist) households, Monday seems to have been treated as the first day of the week. Younger people/children&workers, Monday=schools&fools' day

Yes, I know that's a huge generalisation (and multiple contradictions), but I still reckon it's close to being correct. Pre-industrial pastoralism versus Urbanised-serf rationalism?
 
Conversely, in Reformation/Protestant/Non-Conformist (and atheist) households, Monday seems to have been treated as the first day of the week. Younger people/children&workers, Monday=schools&fools' day
Hmm. Ours was a practicing non-conformist household within my memory (although my parents' belief subsequently lapsed, while that of my brother and me never really got going in the first place). And still I maintain that Sunday is the first day of the week.
 
I reckon it's a generational thing.
My late mum insisted Sunday was the first day of the week and some printed calendars do still reflect that view.
All modern electronic calendar/diary systems though and I expect the vast majority of people under 60 regard Sunday as the second day of the weekend and therefore the final day of the week.
 
So when you 'Sundayers' recited the days of the week as children, you began 'Sunday, Monday, Tuesday..' ?
I'm of the Solomon Grundy / 'Monday's child' school myself and can't really imagine it.
I'm starting to wonder if it's a society-divider on the scale of toilet-roll-hangs-under-or-over?

(Despite being heathens in my family, I always assumed as Mythopoeika that God was getting a rest on the last day of the week after all that hard creation. And wouldn't that be the more traditional view, because people were more likely to be religious in the past? It doesn't quite add up to me. But maybe Christianity would want Sunday first as the most important day of the week? And what with Jesus rising from the dead on a Sunday and all that. Interesting)
 
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Well, it feels like Sunday today, and I'm back at work tomorrow, so maybe the week begins on different days, depending on what you're doing?

I appreciate that I might not have helped very much...
 
"According to international standard ISO 8601, Monday is the first day of the week. It is followed by Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Sunday is the 7th and final day.

"Although this is the international standard, several countries, including the United States, Canada, and Australia consider Sunday as the start of the week."

From this useful site. :cooll:
 
That's just the way printed calendars are. Which has allowed us use calendars from 1985 along with our 20019 calendar. Handy for ephrema hoarders!
 
According to Techy's personal god, the Garmin bike computer, the week begins on a Monday and that's that.
 
My take:
The calender divides the weekend... Sunday is observed as the sabbath or 7th day, because it was usually conveniently arranged for working class church goers...

So it doesn't matter how the calender is printed, but for business convieniences, the work week is in the middle.
 
Virtually all calendars in the US begin the week on Sunday - or, to be more specific, put Sunday in the leftmost column of each month's grid. (No one says explicitly that the leftmost column must represent the beginning, after all.)
So when you 'Sundayers' recited the days of the week as children, you began 'Sunday, Monday, Tuesday..' ?
Yes.
"According to international standard ISO 8601, Monday is the first day of the week. It is followed by Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Sunday is the 7th and final day.
According to ISO 8601 the first week of a year is the week with the year's first Thursday in it - meaning that the standard considers both 29 December 2008 and 3 January 2010 to be part of the year 2009. Clearly this isn't anyone's practice, and it doesn't help with the question at hand. As Wikipedia puts it, "[t]he purpose of this standard is to provide an unambiguous and well-defined method of representing dates and times, so as to avoid misinterpretation of numeric representations of dates and times, particularly when data are transferred between countries with different conventions for writing numeric dates and times." It doesn't supersede those conventions, it only makes sure they can be understood.

As for the sabbath, the seventh day, the day of rest: that would be Saturday in the Old Testament, with Sunday only becoming the day of rest (and special worship) for most Christians due to the importance of the Resurrection. Sunday being the first day was also observed in ancient Egypt, and that calendar was the basis for the Roman 7-day week. It would seem that Monday being the first day is a relatively recent invention, probably due to the influence of Christianity.
 
That's just the way printed calendars are. Which has allowed us use calendars from 1985 along with our 20019 calendar. Handy for ephrema hoarders!

Except that this 2019 calendar is the first one we've had for over 10 years that starts on a Sunday - all the others started on a Monday.

Edit - Our previous calendars have been from BBC Countryfile and Wildlife Trust.
 
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I don't think the week boundaries are all that important unless you map and / or measure your timekeeping in weekly units.

Having grown up in the USA, I was always accustomed to seeing Sunday as the first / leftmost day in the calendars' horizontal rows. This calendar display arrangement didn't mean much in my daily life, insofar as my timekeeping was based on specific dates and months.

As far as weekly blocks were concerned, the only subsidiary distinction I needed to recognize was 'work / school week' versus 'weekend'. The only start and end points anyone cared about were the ones delimiting these two intra-week blocks.

I've known a number of Americans who worked (e.g.) swing shifts that varied from week to week, but I don't recall anyone addressing the agendas and changes in terms of whole weeks rather than specific days.

Weekly-indexed timekeeping was an unexpected surprise when I moved to Stockholm to work for a government agency. The hyper-organized Swedish public sector folks prioritized weekly units in scheduling anything and everything. If anyone wanted to schedule a follow-on meeting, everyone would whip out their organizers and start comparing the opportunities in terms of (e.g.) Week 22 versus Week 23. It blew my mind, and it took some time for me to get accustomed to addressing everything in weekly increments.

I've studied and analyzed a number of workplaces and work processes that involved weekly changes back here in the States, but I can't say I've known anyone here to 'think in terms of whole week units', much less quibble about where those units' boundaries formally lie.
 
I don't think the week boundaries are all that important unless you map and / or measure your timekeeping in weekly units...

It's the quick glance at the kitchen calendar to see what's happening (especially with four adults in the house) - third column from the left was always Wednesday now it's Tuesday -
I'll get used to it but next year I'll have to change again - I'm getting too old for this.
 
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