You know when you ask someone what they're doing next weekend, and they ask if you mean this coming weekend or the one after? Such confusion can now be a thing of the past if we use the little word "oxt". Henceforth, "oxt weekend" means not this weekend, but the following one. Similarly, the oxt World Cup is the one taking place in a network of lava-filled caverns near the Earth's core, and my oxt beer is the one that I will probably spill down my trousers.
There is a shiny website dedicated to promoting "oxt" (oxtweekend.com), which shows a PR-savvy, tech-startup approach to hacking our daily vocabulary. The inventors, Ivan Cash and Jeremy Knight, justify their proposed usage as a "timesaver". Just imagine: seconds could be shaved off your conversations by saying "oxt weekend" instead of "the weekend after this one".
This geekish mania for optimal efficiency even in social contexts is well aligned with the modern culture of "lifehacking" and computerised employee surveillance. The trouble is that, if none of your friends knows what the hell "oxt" means, you'll be taking a lot more time to explain yourself. And since oxtweekend has been going since 2009, it doesn't seem to have caught on all that quickly.
Perhaps it's just its odd sound. (Personally, I picture an oxt weekend as one spent roaming heavily bison-populated prairies.) The vocabulary of time, after all, has its own peculiar specialities in every language. Georgians have a word for "the day after tomorrow" ("zeg"), whereas anglophones have to plod through, er, "the day after tomorrow", hoping their interlocutor doesn't fall asleep before the end. The French, meanwhile, enjoy pleasingly elastic hours, able to indicate whether they mean somewhat less than 60 minutes ("une petite heure") or a bit more ("une grosse heure"). English would surely not be terribly harmed if, in addition to "oxt", people also invented quicker ways to say "three orbits of Uranus ago" or "in exactly the time it takes to speak this sentence".
The only downside is that if we pursue to its logical end the desire to name every possible time backwards and forwards from right now, we'll just end up with a clumsier version of what already works quite well: times and dates. "Oxt weekend"? Oh, you mean Saturday the 2nd, right?
