selling house

What rot. It's not about *anything* the OP might have meant (as in "had in mind"), but what he might have meant *to say* by the words he used. He might well know that some elephants are in fact pink (he may even have had a few floating in his G&T - you know, those ice cube replacement thingies which won't dilute your drink as they melt), but there is no reasonable way he would have intended to put the message "elephants are pink" across by using the words "next year ie 2008".

The subthread is about some wag questioning the OP's point in adding "ie 2008", on the grounds that he "couldn't possibly" have meant anything else by "next year" even if he had omitted "ie 2008". I simply pointed out, serendipitously, that "couldn't possibly" was untrue because even though the OP probably didn't mean anything else, he conceivably could have done.

This is priceless. The whole point of using words is to convey what the speaker/writer means. Language is often a bit of an unreliable channel and can fail to convey one's meaning unambiguously. It is important for the listener/reader therefore to spot potential ambiguities or bits which don't seem to make sense, and to seek clarification either from the wider context or by explicitly asking.

In this case, the OP spotted a potential ambiguity in his output before he even wrote it, and pre-empted any potential request for clarification by supplying the clarification up front. That was good. What was bad was for the OP to be unjustly berated by "Under-the-cosh" for supplying a clarification he considered superfluous.

Not so. We are agreed about roughly what the OP meant by "next year"

*because* he clarified it by adding "ie 2008". Your assertion that the OP could not possibly have meant anything else in the absence of such clarification is not correct, and I moved the discussion to what else he could have meant.

I haven't tried to convince the OP of anything. I've tried to convince

*you* that we don't really know with certainty exactly what the OP means, meant, or could have meant by "next year". Even with his "ie 2008" clarification he could mean at any time during 2008, even as early as January or as late as December.

He doesn't *know* what he wants. He's *asking* about when it would be best to sell. His friend recommended waiting till the spring. If he had meant waiting till spring 2008, this implies that without waiting, he could have been considering going to market as early as next month (he did in fact ask "is there any harm in putting it on the market in january") and if so, one might have expected him to say "next month" instead of "next year". If he meant (as he probably did) that any waiting would end in spring 2008, I put it to you that "next year ie 2008" was perhaps not the best choice of words to describe what would amount to anyime within the first few months of 2008. I would have said something like "early in the new year" instead.

You must try to distinguish between what is unlikely and what is impossible. This is especially important within the speculative realm. If the OP had not added "ie 2008", you say it is impossible that he could have meant anything other than the calendar year 2008 by "next year".

In considering what he could have meant, it is now irrelevant what in fact he did mean. We are speculating. One of the common meanings of "next year" is "about one year from now" (in which case the relevant springtime would indeed be 2009), so he could conceivably have meant that. I agree it's unlikely that he would have meant next tax year 2008-09, but it's certainly not *impossible* that he could have.

Haven't you got anything better to do than prolong this pointless discussion? :-)