"The other day" is one of those phrases everyone uses and no one's ever defined. To some people, it means yesterday. To others, it can stretch back years.
Dr. Luke Jones, who studies how people perceive time at the University of Manchester, says that we're "not very good at remembering exactly when things happened," especially the boring stuff. Most of us can barely remember what we had for lunch a few days ago, let alone when we last went grocery shopping or made a phone call. That's where "the other day" comes in.
There's also a psychological explanation for why something from years ago can feel surprisingly recent. It's called the telescoping effect, and it describes how we misremember when events happened. Older memories can seem much closer than they are, explaining how someone can swear they went to a certain restaurant "the other day" only to discover it closed in 2019.
The opposite can happen with recent memories, too. Human beings are extremely unreliable at remembering dates, which has caused headaches for researchers trying to figure out when people last visited a doctor or bought something.
Age might also have something to do with the increasingly generous definition of "recent." People commonly report that time seems to pass more quickly as they get older, so a few years can feel like a much shorter stretch. That could explain why some people still talk about a vacation from 1994 like everyone should remember what happened.
Most of the time, an exact date isn't necessary anyway. If you're telling a friend about something weird that happened at the grocery store, "the other day" gets the point across just fine. But when the timing actually matters, therapist Rebecca Mackillop says that asking a follow-up question is a better approach than assuming everyone uses the phrase the same way.