Happy New Year!

Now that this minor detail is out of the way, I need to tell you about something that I feel rather strongly about.  The new year is 2010.  That is pronounced TWENTY-TEN.  I know that most of us have not been calling the last few years twenty-oh-nine and so forth.  We have used two-thousand-and-nine.  Yes we have.  But now that it is 2010, it is time to get this right.

I understand that the year after two-thousand was two-thousand-and-one.  I said it that way too.  Do you know why?  Because Arthur C Clarke wrote a book in 1948 that was later turned into a movie.  You know the one.  2001: A Space Odyssey.  It was good enough that we all called the year two-thousand-and-one.  And that’s OK.  But it is time to grow up now.  The year 2000 is not some futuristic date in the future anymore.  It is so ten years ago now.  It’s time to say it right.

This year is twenty-ten.  Next year will be twenty-eleven.  It is so much shorter and concise than the two-thousand-and-ten that I keep hearing people say.  We have been using it already.  Every reference to the 2010 Olympics (coming to Cascadia!) has been twenty-ten.  When we speak of the upcoming Olympics in London and in Rio de Janerio, they have always said twenty-twelve and twenty-sixteen.  In most future references to these dates, we have tended to use twenty-something, rather than two-thousand-and-something.

We should also follow the conventions that we have always used.  I was born in nineteen-sixty-two, not nineteen-hundred-and-sixty-two, nor in one-thousand-nine-hundred-and-sixty-two.  Why did we change?

You don’t believe me?  Well, here are some dates that you learned in school:

  • The year of US Independence?  Seventeen-seventy-six.
  • Just to be equal, the Creation of Canada?  Eighteen-sixty-seven.
  • Pilgrims land on Plymouth Rock?  Sixteen-twenty.
  • Columbus “discovered” “America”?  Fourteen-ninety-two.
  • World War II?  Nineteen-forty-one.

So why shouldn’t the year coming up be pronounced twenty-ten?  Oh, wait.  Do we think it is different in years divisible by ten or something?  Then how about this (if you were really paying attention in school):

  • Leif Ericson and the Vikings really discover America?  Ten-oh-five.  1005.  Back in school, we never said one-thousand-and-five.  Ten-oh-five.

So, with all of this precedent, would it be too difficult to start saying the date correctly as twenty-ten?  Every time I hear it said the other way, it just makes me think that the speaker doesn’t know how to say it right.  So, please say it right.  Twenty-ten.

And, happy new year!

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