It’s hard to forget a year like 2000. Bill Clinton was still in office, gas prices hovered around $1.50, and N* Sync released their No Strings Attached album. Also, and slightly less well remembered, almost everyone wrongly believed we had entered the 21st Century. Before you freak, let me explain. Technically, the year 2000 marked the final year of the 20th century, and 2001 the first of the new one. (If you wonder why, the short answer is because there was no “year 0,” and the long answer involves psychology and the way we count.)
Back then I remember I couldn’t turn around metaphorically without hearing someone misstating the entrance into the 21st Century, or someone else trying to correct the misperceptions. I personally took the same approach toward correcting people about it as I’ve taken with grammar: if it’s a friend, really ream ’em for it, but if it’s a stranger or acquaintance, who really cares? I mean, it’s all just semantics, right? By 2002 the calendar semantics became a thing of the past. Or so I thought.
Recently though, a new calendar issue has me pretty flummoxed, apoplectic and all manner of good ol’ fashioned angry words. The cause of my unexpected ire? The way people pronounce the years after 2010.
I know, I know, it’s a dumb thing to worry about in this age of war, economic uncertainty and finals. But, as time marches inexorably forward, and I increasingly hear more people referring to “two-thousand eleven” or—worse—“two-thousand twenty,” a small part of me grows more and more desperate. All those extra syllables, all that time wasted, when a simple “twenty-eleven” or “twenty-twenty” says the same thing more elegantly, more simply and yes, even more futuristically.
And I’m not the only one. David Crystal, author of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, has said much about this pronunciation problem. According to The Times of London, he thinks people will start to switch over to “twenty [whatever]”in 2011. “Rhythm counts for everything in something like this,” he said. “Logic never enters into language matters.”
That’s for sure. I’m even starting to hear scientists—the biggest lobbyists of the “2001 is the first year” fight—refer to future years in this barbaric, syllable-wasting fashion. Don’t they know? Haven’t they done analyses into how much time people waste uttering those extra words? I usually turn to my scientist and engineer friends for their ability to ignore popular convention and do what is right, or at least efficient, regardless. In a weird way, to see them falling victim to this new scourge almost breaks my heart. I thought I knew them.
I hope, as Crystal does, that the problem will eventually work itself out. Maybe, 10 years from now in “twenty-eighteen” no one will even remember we used to throw on all those extra words. It could be a forgotten issue, like the 2000/2001 battle for supremacy or, if I’m really lucky, the battle for a catchier named decade than “the two-thousands.” I guess only time can tell.
Do you have 20/20 vision? E-mail Bill at science@dailycardinal.com.
