Not enough ado about this and that

OK, so demonstrative pronouns and their inconsistent use across dialects.

I'm South African and have noticed a quirk in some Brit and Yank usages of this and that which really cause me to break out in nervous eye twitches.

It usually crops up when enumerating some list of objects, whether concrete or abstract.

For example:

The company is involved in social responsibility activities such as soup kitchens, after-school football clinics and local cleanups; things like this.

Demonstrative pronouns, to my mind, are used to reference nouns according to the speaker's immediate scope of influence over them. This implies that they are under the speaker's influence. That implies that they are out reach of the speaker's influence at the time of speaking.

In the above example, the activities listed are not within the speaker's current and immediate scope of influence and therefore it should be that.

So, to my question. If you use this in this way, what is your internal mental experience in relation to the nouns referred to? Are you mentally bringing them into your scope of influence?

Solution 1:

The speaker is using the this to indicate things he does indeed have influence over. These are the things he is speaking of or talking about, his enumeration. In that sense he has brought them into his sphere of influence.

I believe either this or that could be used in any event. The only time they would be kept carefully apart is when the speaker is at some pains to distinguish between two sets of things. My mother has her own nervous eye twitches when she says This (her) carpet now has muddy paw prints from that (my) dog.