Premature celebrations

Although this blog normally concerns itself with language and literature, today's brief essay has more to do with numbers. But let's begin with words: decade, meaning 10 years, and century, meaning 100 years. So welcome to 2020, but is this really the start of a new decade? Only if there was a decade somewhere in history that had only nine years in it.

So why is it that everywhere one looks, supposedly intelligent people are talking about the beginning of a new decade and remarking on the best and worst of the previous decade? These same supposedly intelligent people 20 years ago were celebrating the start of a new century one year early.

I think these people may be confused by their own birthdays. On your 10th birthday you have lived 10 years and are beginning your 11th, a new decade in your life. But on the day of your birth, your age started at zero and began building from there. There was no year 0 on the calendar, however. The counting of years, totally arbitrary based on an erroneous estimate of the year Christ was born, began with 1. The previous year was 1 B.C., or before Christ. And so the first decade of the Christian era ended with the conclusion of the 10th year, not its beginning. Every decade since then has ended with the conclusion of a year ending in zero and every century with a year ending with double zero.

On a related matter having more to do with language, I wonder if 2020 will finally be the year the majority of English speakers finally leaving out "thousand" when they say the year. Back in 1999, nobody pronounced the year as one-thousand-nine-hundred-ninety-nine. It was just nineteen-ninety-nine. For the next ten years, however, it made sense to include "thousand" when saying the year, since to do otherwise would have been more cumbersome. That changed in 2010, yet out of habit most people said two-thousand-ten rather than the simpler twenty-ten. And so it has continued every year since.

But 2020 may be the year we all finally break the habit. Twenty-twenty is just so much easier and more fun to say than two-thousand-twenty. Perhaps a year from now the word thousand in our year will, like the decade, finally be history.