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Decades: A Small Rant
I just read the following phrase on a blog I frequent (which will remain unnamed to protect the blogger): “I ought to care that a decade is about to end (in 17 days!).” No, it isn’t, unless you are referring to a moving 10-year unit that came into existence in Year 11.
Now I recognize that there are calendar units called “decades” and cultural units called “decades.” They seem to be one year apart. The calendar decades take into account that there was no year “0.” There was the year “1.” Hence, a decade ends on the last day of a ten-year period that starts on the first day of a numbered year ending in “1,” e.g., 2001, 2011, 2021.
Culturally, we have tended to think of decades as beginning in numbered years ending with “0,” e.g., 2000, 2010, 2020. It makes it easy to label the various generations, e.g., millennials, Gen X, etc. Remember the Y2K scare? Disaster was to strike at the start of the new “century,” January 1, 2000.
I have occasionally posted on Facebook about ultra-endurance cycling events. In my summary of, say, the finishers on Race Day 27, some commenter will invariably ask if I am a day off, since the race clock shows their time as 26:xx:xx? So, I gently remind them that there is no Race Day 0, just as I am in my 70th year, which will not be completed for some months yet.
The language of math is complicated, no?
Published in General
Are you saying it’s boring, repetitive, and tense?
You and the New York Times keep making this argument every 10 years….
Now, Gary, that’s just cruel, comparing a Ricochet member to the New York Times.
If the shoe fits….
Waves “me too.”
My own mini-rant is what to call the years we’re living in during this century. Most people say that this year is “two thousand nineteen.” But in the last century, say in 1998, did we say it’s “one thousand nine hundred ninety-eight?” No, we said “nineteen ninety-eight.” That’s why I usually try to say it’s “twenty-nineteen.”
End of a really mini-rant.
Thank you for drawing some fire away from me, @oldphil.
You must run in different circles than I do. I almost never hear anyone say that.
It’s only the fashionable set, dahling.
You’re in your 70th year?!?
For some reason I thought you were a really smart Millennial. (Shows what I know!)
Seems to be a lot of that going around.
Most people can’t count to ten if you spot them the one and let them use their fingers.
Well, Bruce, I don’t see any reason to depart from a tradition of roughly 1,500 years in order to make you the “big counting sheriff.”
Perhaps there should have been a year zero. There was not. No amount of insisting on your part is going to make it so.
There were many dating systems in the ancient world. The Romans used one (abbreviated “AUC”) based on the semi-mythical founding of the city, in what we now call the year 753 BC.
So the year before the hypothetical birth of Christ was the year 753 AUC. So 1 BC = 753 AUC, and 1 AD = 754 AD, with no year zero in the system.
Wait a minute, there’s proof:
So we’re not even within a year of the “current” decadenal marker?!
I say twenty nineteen. I called the year after 2000, twenty oh one. I am looking forward to January when I think most of us will be saying twenty twenty.
I must maintain that 1963 is the correct date for the beginning of the ’60s although I realize that opens me up to charges Fabism.
I said “two-thousand, two-thousand-one, -two…” etc through “ten” whereupon I might mix it up between “two-thousand eleven” etc and “twenty-eleven” etc.
Well, they’re not mostly congenital idiots, at least. They’re just lazy and their minds are soft and slack.
When they hate you, you know you’re a good drill sergeant.