18 ms·
Let's stop counting centuries
- gcp123 2y agoAuthor makes a good point. "1700s" is both more intuitive and more concise than "18th century". The very first episode of Alex Trebeck's Jeopardy in 1984 illustrates how confusing this can be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDTxS9_CwZA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDTxS9_CwZA The "Final Jeopardy" question simply asked on what date did the 20th century begin, and all three contestants got it wrong, leading to a 3-way tie.
- semireg 2y agoThe right answer was, and still is: Jan 1, 1901
- readthenotes1 2y agoHow can that be if 15 of those centuries are on the Julian calendar?
- whycome 2y agoAlso, when they switched things in 1582: https://www.britannica.com/story/ten-days-that-vanished-the-switch-to-the-gregorian-calendar#:~:text=The%20most%20surreal%20part%20of,skipping%20any%20major%20Christian%20festivals https://www.britannica.com/story/ten-days-that-vanished-the-.... > The most surreal part of implementing the new calendar came in October 1582, when 10 days were dropped from the calendar to bring the vernal equinox from March 11 back to March 21. The church had chosen October to avoid skipping any major Christian festivals.
- pdonis 2y agoThe century in which the switch occurred (which was different in different countries) was shorter than the others. As were the decade, year, and month in which the switch occurred.
- Archelaos 2y agoThe "original" Julian calendar was indifferent to year number systems. The Romans typically used the consular year, although Marcus Terentius Varro "introduced" the ab urbe condita (AUC) system in the 1st century BC, which was used until the Middle Ages. From the 5th to the 7th century, the anno Diocletiani (also called anno martyrum) after emperor Diocletian was used primarily in the eastern empire (Alexandria), or the anno mundi (after the creation of the world). It was Dionysius Exiguus in the 6th century, who replaced the anno Diocletiani era with the Anno Domini era. His system become popular in the West, but it took a long time until it also was adopted in the East. Its application to years before the birth of Christ is very late: we come across it first in the 15th century, but it was not widespread before the 17th century. All these systems used the Julian system for months and days, but differed in terms of the year and (partialy) in the first day of the year.
- hgomersall 2y agoNo, the first century began Jan 1, 0000. Whether that year actually existed or not is irrelevant - we shouldn't change our counting system in the years 100, 200 etc.
- Izkata 2y agoThe calendar goes from 1 BC to 1 AD, there is no year 0.
- hgomersall 2y agoWhat does that even mean? Do we allow for the distortion due to the shift from the Julian to Gregorian calendars, such that the nth year is 11 days earlier? Of course not, because that would be stupid. Instead, we accept that the start point was arbitrary and reference to our normal counting system rather than getting hung up about the precise number of days since some arbitrary epoch.
- pdonis 2y ago> What does that even mean? It means just what it says. In the common calendar, the year after 1 BC (or BCE in the new notation) was 1 AD (or CE in the new notation). There was no "January 1, 0000".
- hgomersall 2y agoAs I said twice, whether that date actually existed or not is irrelevant.
- pdonis 2y ago> whether that date actually existed or not is irrelevant. No, it isn't, since you explicitly said to start the first century on the date that doesn't exist. What does that even mean?
- 2y ago
- glitcher 2y agoIncorrect, this answer wasn't given in the form of a question ;)
- drivers99 2y agoThere are numerous common concise ways to write the 18th century, at the risk of needing the right context to be understood, including “C18th”, “18c.”, or even “XVIII” by itself.
- anyfoo 2y agoThese are even more impractical, so I wonder what your point is? I can come up with an even shorter way to say 18th century, by using base26 for example, so let's denote it as "cR". What has been gained?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- drivers99 2y agoThese are ones that are actually used, not just ones I made up. Sorry that wasn't more clear. I really hate conversation on this site.
- anyfoo 2y agoThat wasn't the point. The point is that they are still more impractical than what the original comment suggested, shorter and common or not. > I really hate conversation on this site. Original commenter may feel the same about your reply.
- Kwpolska 2y ago> very first It’s actually the second. > Trebeck's Trebek's*
- card_zero 2y agoLet's reform Alex Trebek's name, it's difficult.
- c0balt 2y agoAnd while we are at it, Tim Apple
- bitwize 2y agoThere was an airport-novel series about a future where people's surnames are the company they work for. It was called Jennifer Government. Some of the characters in Death Stranding, namely the main one, have a given-name, profession, employer convention -- as in Sam Porter Bridges.
- monkeyfun 2y agoAhhh, reminding me of Nation-States too. What a curious little website / online community.
- krsdcbl 2y agoDeath strandings naming is not too far from very common naming conventions throughout history, it's a nicely subtle touch. Glenn Miller, Gregory Porter and Sam Smith just happen to have been more inclined to make music.
- nkrisc 2y agoAnd in the far future of that future surnames like Government or PepsiCo or Alcoa will be as common as Smith, Fletcher, and Miller.
- runarberg 2y agoIn Icelandic the 1-based towards counting is used almost everywhere. People do indeed say: “The first decade of the 19th century” to refer to the 18-aughts, and the 90s is commonly referred to as “The tenth decade”. This is also done to age ranges, people in their 20s (or 21-30 more precisely) are said to be þrítugsaldur (in the thirty age). Even the hour is sometime counted towards (though this is more rare among young folks), “að ganga fimm” (or going 5) means 16:01-17:00. Speaking for my self, this doesn’t become any more intuitive the more you use this, people constantly confuse decades and get insulted by age ranges (and freaked out when suddenly the clock is “going five”). People are actually starting to refer to the 90s as nían (the nine) and the 20-aughts as tían (the ten). Thought I don’t think it will stick. When I want to be unambiguous and non-confusing I usually add the -og-eitthvað (and something) as a suffix to a year ending with zero, so the 20th century becomes nítjánhundruð-og-eitthvað, the 1990s, nítíu-og-eitthvað and a person in their 20s (including 20) becomes tuttugu-og-eitthvað.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jrockway 2y agoOn the other hand "1700s art" sounds like trash compared to "18th century art".
- rz2k 2y agoHow about if you say "settecento"? Maybe it is a new confusion that they drop a thousand years, and maybe it would imply Italian art specifically.
- lucb1e 2y agoJust to make sure I understood this, that would be used as "17th settecento" to mean 1700s right? (This Xth century business always bothered and genuinely confused me to no end and everyone always dismissed my objections that it's a confusing thing to say. I'm a bit surprised, but also relieved, to see this thread exists. Yes, please, kill all off-by-one century business in favor of 1700s and 17th settecento or anything else you fancy, so long as it's 17-prefixed/-suffixed and not some off-by-anything-other-than-zero number)
- animaomnium 2y ago"settecento" can be read as "seven hundred" in Italian; gramps is proposing to use a more specific word as a tag for Italian art from the 1700s. Of course, 700 is not 1700, hence the "drop 1000 years". The prefix seventeen in Italian is "diciassette-" so perhaps "diciasettecento" would be more accurate for the 1700s. (settecento is shorter, though.) Hope this clarifies. Not to miss the forest for the trees, to reiterate, the main takeaway is that it may be better to define and use a specific tag to pinpoint a sequence of events in a given period (e.g. settecento) instead of gesturing with something as arbitrary and wide as a century (18th century art).
- worstspotgain 2y agoYou're looking for millesettecento [1]. Italian doesn't do 10-99 hundreds, just 1-9 hundreds and 1-99 thousands. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMIGnMs4VZA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMIGnMs4VZA
- masswerk 2y agoSo shouldn't this be the "0-episode"? ;-) (0, because only after the first question, we have actually 1 episode performed. Consequently, the 1-episode is then the second one.)
- darby_nine 2y ago> Author makes a good point. "1700s" is both more intuitive and more concise than "18th century". Yea, but a rhetorical failure. This sounds terrible and far worse than alternatives. If we want a better system we'll need to either abandon the day or the Gregorian (Julian + drift) caliendar.
- tempodox 2y agoLogic is in short supply and off-by-one errors are everywhere. Most people don't care. I think it's more doable to learn to just live with that than to reprogram mankind.
- zepolen 2y agoThat's what most people think and the world keeps trucking along. It's the rare people that don't who actually change the world.
- tempodox 2y agoYou can change the world if you make it easier to meet a need enough people have. Persuading everyone they're holding it wrong is not that.
- zepolen 2y agoThose are exactly the same thing if you convince everyone they are holding it wrong by holding it right.
- jdhzzz 2y agoe.g. Fosbury flop (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fosbury_flop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fosbury_flop)
- lukan 2y ago"You can change the world if you make it easier to meet a need enough people have" True and should not be forgotten in this debate. But clear communication is a need many people have.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
- d0mine 2y agoThere is no "0" year, 1 is the 1st year, so 100th year is still the 1st century, therefore 2nd century starts in 101 and 20th in 1901.
- notfed 2y agoI find this decree frustrating. Someone could have just as easily said "the 'first' century starts at 1 BC" to account for this.
- 38 2y agoOr better yet just year 0, why not? Do we say the 80s start in 1981?
- rdlw 2y agoThe concept of zero was not popularized in 500s Europe, when the system was devised.
- karatinversion 2y agoAnd also, the system is a direct descendant of regnal numbering, where zero wouldn’t have made sense even if invented (there is no zeroth year of Joe Biden’s term of office).
- Thorrez 2y agoThen what is the last year of the first century BC? 2 BC? Now there's an off-by-2!
- karatinversion 2y agoDo you also count the first decade of your life from January 1st of the year before you were born?
- Zambyte 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asian_age_reckoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asian_age_reckoning
- swyx 2y agothat is fascinating trivia. you could do a whole Jeopardy on Jeopardy facts alone
- dantyti 2y agoWhat about languages that don’t have an equivalent to “the Xs” for decades or centuries? Also, 1799 is obviosly more than 1700, as well as 1701 > 1700 – why should the naming convention tie itself to the lesser point? After one’s third birthday, the person is starting their fourth year and is not living in their third year. I feel this is relevant https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- zozbot234 2y ago1700s means 1700–1709, i.e. roughly the first decade in the 18th century. Just like '2000s'. The OP acknowledges this issue and then just ignores it.
- Viliam1234 2y agoI have a solution that would work in writing, but not sure how to pronounce it: 1700s means 1700–1709 1700ss means 1700–1799 To go one step further: 2000s means 2000-2009 2000ss means 2000-2099 2000sss means 2000-2999
- ajuc 2y agoDepends on the language. Century being 3 syllables really makes it long in English, but it's still 5 syllables vs 5 syllables. In Polish: [lata] tysiącsiedemsetne (6 [+2] syllables) vs osiemnasty wiek (5 syllables).
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Isamu 2y agoWell yeah, most of the time if I want to be understood I will say “the 1700s” because it is straightforward to connect with familiar dates. We still say “20th century” though because that’s idiomatic.
- macintux 2y agoThe author's point is that idioms change, and this one should.
- Isamu 2y agoI think you misunderstand me. I mean ONLY the specific idiom “the 20th century” because we’ve just spent more than a century using that and it is unambiguous, it’s clear. Use “the 1700s” and the like for all other cases.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- wwilim 2y ago1800-1899 is the eighteen-hundreds, 1800-1809 is the eighteen-noughties. Easy.
- James_K 2y agoOne point, the singular they has been in use for centuries, where this essay suggests it's a recent invention.
- networked 2y agoThe essay doesn't really say anything about when the singular "they" was invented. What it says is that it used to be low-status and unsophisticated language. > In the 1970s, fancy people would have sniffed at using “they” rather than “he” for a single person of unknown sex like this. But today, fancy people would sniff at not doing that. How did that happen? > I think “they” climbed the prestige ladder—people slowly adopted it in gradually more formal and higher-status situations until it was everywhere.
- dahart 2y agoThe essay’s narrative is overly simplified and misleading about details. Singular they has been common for centuries. The idea that it was lower status is a more recent invention. The author might be referring more to use of they as a personal pronoun. Anyway, whatevs, language changes, that part of author’s message is good.
- Tao3300 2y agoYeah, I'm old enough that I remember being taught not to use singular they in elementary school, but I'm young enough that he/she was given as the preferred alternative.
- networked 2y ago> This leaves ambiguous how to refer to decades like 1800-1809. There is the apostrophe convention for decades. You can refer to the decade of 1800–1809 as "the '00s" when the century is clear from the context. (The Chicago Manual of Style allows it: https://english.stackexchange.com/a/299512 https://english.stackexchange.com/a/299512.) If you wanted to upset people, you could try adding the century back: "the 18'00s". :-) There is also the convention of replacing parts of a date with "X" characters or an em dash ("—") or an ellipses ("...") in fiction, like "in the year 180X". It is less neat but unambiguous about the range when it's one "X" for a digit. (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YearX https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YearX has an interesting collection of examples. A few give you the century, decade, and year and omit the millennium.) Edit: It turns out the Library of Congress has adopted a date format based on ISO 8601 with "X" characters for unspecified digits: https://www.loc.gov/standards/datetime/ https://www.loc.gov/standards/datetime/.
- dkdbejwi383 2y agoHow do you speak it though? The “oh ohs”? “Noughts”? “Zeroes”?
- PopAlongKid 2y agoAughts.
- James_K 2y agoAnother ambiguity, though perhaps less important, is that "2000s" could refer to 2000-2999.
- MarkLowenstein 2y agoCould make the convention to say "the twenty hundreds" when referring to [2000, 2100), and "the two thousands" for [2000, 3000).
- kelnos 2y agoI actually really like that! But then how about [2000, 2010)? During the current time period, I expect people are more likely to refer to the decade rather than the century or millennium.
- MarkLowenstein 2y agoI don't have a good solution for that. Perhaps we're finding out why people have come up with weird terms like "naughts" or saying "aught-five".
- whycome 2y agolife in the 20s is weird.
- riffic 2y agoAlternatively: the third millennium.
- lucb1e 2y agoTook me a while to understand what's ambiguous about that. For anyone else, what they're saying is that this often (typically, I guess) refers to 2000-2099 and not the other 900 years.
- kelnos 2y agoNot "another"; the article addresses this, and admits to not having a good solution, aside from just writing out the actual dates as you did.
- milliams 2y agoIt's easy, we should have simply started counting centuries from zero. Centuries should be zero-indexed, then everything works. We do the same with people's ages. For the entire initial year of your life you were zero years old. Likewise, from years 0-99, zero centuries had passed so we should call it the zeroth century! At least this is how I justify to my students that zero-indexing makes sense. Everyone's fought the x-century vs x-hundreds before so they welcome relief. Izzard had the right idea: https://youtu.be/uVMGPMu596Y?si=1aKZ2xRavJgOmgE8&t=643 https://youtu.be/uVMGPMu596Y?si=1aKZ2xRavJgOmgE8&t=643
- mmmmmbop 2y ago> We do the same with people's ages. No, we don't. When we refer to 'the first year of life', we mean the time from birth until you turn 1. Similarly, you'd say something like 'you're a child in the first decade of your life and slowly start to mature into a young adult by the end of the second decade', referring to 0-9 and 10-19, respectively.
- jcelerier 2y agoThe first year of life is the year indexed with zero, just like the first centimeter/inch in a ruler is the centimeter/inch indexed with zero
- Uehreka 2y ago> No, we don't. But practically speaking we usually do. I always hear people refer to events in their life happening “when I was 26” and never “in the 27th year of my life”. Sure you could say the latter, but practically speaking people don’t (at least in English).
- wryoak 2y agoI thought this article was railing against the lumping together of entire spans of hundreds of years as being alike (ie, we lump together 1901 and 1999 under the name ”the 1900s” despite their sharing only numerical similarity), and was interested until I learned the author’s real, much less interesting intention
- endofreach 2y agoMany people find their own thoughts more interesting than the ones of others. Some write. Many don't.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- layer8 2y ago[flagged]
- psychoslave 2y agoI found your sarcasm very enjoyable and ended up disappointed I couldn't come with the next meta-sarcasm. How dare you?!
- art_vandalay 2y ago[dead]
- wavemode 2y agoI do tend to say "the XX00s", since it's almost always significantly clearer than "the (XX+1)th century". > There’s no good way to refer to 2000-2009, sorry. This isn't really an argument against the new convention, since even in the old convention there was no convenient way of doing so. People mostly just say "the early 2000s" or explicitly reference a range of years. Very occasionally you'll hear "the aughts".
- conception 2y agoThe 2000-2009’s are the aughts!
- buzzy_hacker 2y agoThe noughties!
- hansvm 2y agoYou ought naught to propose such noughts!
- kmoser 2y agoI think you mean "twenty-aughts" (to differentiate them from the nineteen-aughts, 1900-1909).
- jhbadger 2y agoI wonder at what point we can just assume decades belong to the current century. Will "the twenties" in the US always primarily mean Prohibition, flappers, and Al Capone or will it ever mean this decade?
- fragmede 2y agoI say give it 11 years or so for 2020's kids to starting come into age, and twenties babies will refer to babies born in the 2020's and not centenarians.
- MarkLowenstein 2y agoA lot of this runaround is happening because people get hung up on the fact that the "AD" era began as AD 1. But that year is not magic--it didn't even correlate with the year of Jesus's birth or death. So let's just start the AD era a year before, and call that year "AD 0". It can even overlap with BC 1. BC 1 is the same as AD 0. Fine, we can handle that, right? Then the 00s are [0, 100), 100s are [100, 200), etc. Zero problem, and we can start calling them the 1700s etc., guilt free.
- hgomersall 2y agoThis is the right answer.
- card_zero 2y agoThis reminds me that centuries such as "the third century BC" are even harder to translate into date ranges. That one's 201 BC to 300 BC, inclusive, backward. Or you might see "the last quarter of the second millennium BC", which means minus 2000 to about minus 1750. [Edit: no it doesn't.] In fact archeologists have adapted to writing "CE" and "BCE" these days, but despite that flexibility I've never seen somebody write a date range like "the 1200s BCE". But they should.
- arp242 2y agoSome people have proposed resetting year 1 to 10,000 years earlier. The current year would be 12024. This way you can have pretty much all of recoded human history in positive dates, while still remaining mostly compatible with the current system. It would certainly be convenient, but I don't expect significant uptick any time soon. For earlier dates "n years ago" is usually easier, e.g. "The first humans migrated to Australia approximately 50,000 years ago".
- abhinavk 2y agoHuman Era. There is a Wendover Productions video about this. They also sell a calendar.
- 2y ago
- kleiba 2y agoMeh, too small of an issue to be bothered about it.
- OmarShehata 2y agosmall issues are easy to solve! I think it isn't as sexy/interesting as what I thought the article was going to be about (about a different way of talking about our history, in eras maybe vs centuries or something). this strikes me as kind of like a small PR to our language that makes an incremental improvement to a clearly confusing thing. Should be easy to merge :)
- AnimalMuppet 2y agoNo, not easy. You want to change ao social convention? That is not easy. Even changing all the places it got encoded into software probably wouldn't be easy.
- kergonath 2y ago> Should be easy to merge :) Famous last words. Seriously, though, we should have learnt at this point: we cannot solve social issues with technology. Everybody is working on a different tree, and social dynamics that govern the spread of idioms and from which fork you cherry-pick or merge is much more complex than what git is designed to handle.
- bowsamic 2y ago> small issues are easy to solve! Citation heavily needed
- OmarShehata 2y ago> Citation heavily needed I'm not going to give you any proof of this, because I know you've seen it, but I think I just wasn't very clear on what I meant here. I'm talking about PRs that fix a typo in the docs, or tweak confusing wording. You know the ones I'm talking about, the ones that get merged immediately because it's clearly just better
- ditiyaf1 2y ago[flagged]
- aaroninsf 2y ago[flagged]
- acheron 2y agoSure, then we can switch to French Revolutionary metric time.
- runarberg 2y ago> There’s no good way to refer to 2000-2009, sorry. The author is wrong here. The correct way (at least in spoken West Coast American English) is the Twenty-aughts. There is even a Wikipedia page dedicated to the term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aughts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aughts If you want to be fancy you could spell it like the 20-aughts. I suppose there is no spelling it with only digits+s though, which maybe what the author was looking for.
- drewcoo 2y ago[flagged]
- t_mann 2y ago> There’s no good way to refer to 2000-2009 I like the German Nullerjahre (roughly, the nil years). Naught years or twenty-naughts works pretty well too imho.
- Georgelemental 2y agoIn the USA we say “the aughts”
- arp242 2y agoI've always written it like "1900s", and always considered "20th century" to be confusing. Having to mentally do c-- or c++ is confusing and annoying. I deal with the "2000s-problem" by using "00s" to refer to the decade, which everyone seems to understand. Sometimes I also use "21st century"; I agree with the author that it's okay in that case, because no one is confused by it. For historical 00s I'd probably use "first decade of the 1700s" or something along those lines. But I'm not a historian and this hasn't really come up.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- riffic 2y ago[flagged]
- Doctor_Fegg 2y ago> Did the American revolution happen before, during, or after the Enlightenment? I’ve no idea. When did the American revolution happen? Not everyone’s cultural frame of reference is the same as yours. I can tell you when the Synod of Whitby happened, though.
- mixmastamyk 2y agoThe American and French Revolutions are a pretty big deal on the road to modern democracy, as well as being tied to 1700s Enlightenment ideals. Everyone educated should know this.
- IshKebab 2y agoA pretty big deal in America. I don't think knowledge of the exact date of the American Revolution is a requirement for education outside America. At least no more than "17something...ish".
- IIAOPSW 2y ago"17something...ish" is enough to answer (or at least make a high confidence guess at) the original question (was the American Revolution contemporary with the enlightenment?)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Dalewyn 2y agoFor that matter, a lot of historical dates we consider important are only important to us because A) we're westerners and B) we got them drilled into us by textbooks and classes. The remaining majority of the world (the west is a minority) sincerely couldn't care less about the American or French or Industrial Revolutions or Columbus (re)discovering America or the Hundred Years War or the Black Death or the Fall of Rome or whatever else. Kind of like how we as westerners generally couldn't care less about Asian, African, Middle Eastern, Indian, or Polynesian histories. The culture we grow up in and become indoctrinated by determines what is important and what is not. And just so we're clear, this bit of ignorance is perfectly fine: Life is short, ain't nobody got time for shit that happened to people you don't even know who lived somewhere you will never see.
- Grom_PE 2y agoI agree. Another good point to get rid of counting centuries would be that in some languages (Russian) centuries are written in Roman numerals. It's annoying having to pause and think of conversion.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- huma 2y agoThankfully, most of us quit writing centuries in Roman numerals, it's about time we quit centuries as well :) Sadly, however, the regnal numbers continue to persist
- renewiltord 2y agoI'm going to count centuries but just call it the 0th century until 100 CE. I anticipate no problems.
- karaterobot 2y agoI have to say that I don't think this is really a problem.
- kelnos 2y agoWhen compared to climate change, sure, not really. But it's definitely annoying sometimes.
- osigurdson 2y agoIf I lived much longer than 100 years I might care more about the precision of such language. However, as it stands, I know what people mean when they say "remember the early 2000s". I know that doesn't mean the 2250s for example - a reasonable characterization for someone living in 3102 perhaps.
- layer8 2y agoAs a kid I came across a book titled “Scientists of the 20th century”, and I was intrigued how the authors knew about future scientists.
- hamasho 2y agoIt's funny that for me it feels right to associate the 20s with 2020 and the 40s with 1940, but somehow, the 30s is very foreign, and I can't think of 1930 or 2030 either.
- kelnos 2y agoFunny, when you say "20s" I think of the 1920s (aka the "Roaring 20s" here in the US). I wonder if it's an age thing (I'm in my 40s), or perhaps a cultural or regional thing. The 30s as 1930s seems pretty solid to me: US Great Depression, start of WWII, not to mention many of the smaller conflicts that led up to it.
- globular-toast 2y agoI definitely think of the 1920s too, although I'm only a bit younger. I don't get why anyone would refer to now as the 20s because it's still happening and hasn't necessarily been shaped yet. That and it's close enough to still refer to individual years. What is odd is that I never feel the need to refer to the 00s. I've never said "naughties" or anything else. In the 90s, people already talked about the 80s, but for me it's all been pretty much the same since the 00s. I don't even know what I'd talk about from the 00s. The music? 2001 by Dr. Dre came out in 1999. It could have been made today. Fight Club was 1999. Could have been made today. The fashion? People have straight hair and wear t-shirts still today.
- greenbit 2y agoWhen you find yourself putting a sticker that says 2030 on your license plate, chances are 30s won't mean 1930s very much longer.
- hamasho 2y agoYou may get the point. My background as a Japanese in my 30s may affect how I perceive those periods. I have feelings for the 40s because WWII is mentioned often. For the 80s, even though I wasn't born yet, many people talk about it as the best period for Japan, so I have a concrete image of that too. And the 90s and 00s are when I was a kid/teenager so I have an emotional connection with the period. Other than these, I have weak connections and just think of the current or near-past periods.
- croemer 2y agoI think this is incorrect. Don't centuries start with the 00? In that case the first year of a century is 0, and the 76th year would be 75, not 76 as the author writes: > starting in 1776, not in the 76th year of the 18th century.
- mason55 2y agoNo, because there was no year zero. The first century started in the year 1 AD.
- labster 2y agoThere was an astronomical year zero, it’s mainly historians who don’t want the year zero to happen.
- croemer 2y agoAnd there is a year zero in the ISO 8601:2004 system, the interchange standard for all calendar numbering systems (where year zero coincides with the Gregorian year 1 BC; see conversion table). [via Wikipedia]
- exegete 2y agoUnfortunately that’s not the convention. AD centuries start with 1 (eg 1901 to 2000 is the 20th century). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_century https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_century
- globular-toast 2y agoI had no idea that the "21st century" started in 2001. Totally thought it started in 2000. Is that why so many things refer to 2001? Mind blown...
- redhippo 2y agoI thought the exact same thing... when I was eight. Then I just learned the mental gymnastics of hearing, say, "20th century" and associating it with "1900" at got along with it. Really, it's a bit dated, but if people can function with miles and furlongs, they can handle centuries...
- kelnos 2y agoIt's funny, I'm in my 40s and my brain still pauses longer than I'd expect is necessary to do that conversion. I think for 21st or 20th century I'm fine (since I've lived in both of them), but anything prior and it takes me a beat to figure out which date range it is.
- dudeinjapan 2y ago> There’s no good way to refer to 2000-2009, sorry. In terms of music this is true.
- samatman 2y agoTechnically, decades and centuries start in a January with one or two zeros at the end, respectively. So the 1700s and the 18th century are exactly the same interval of time. ISO 8601-2: > Decade: A string consisting of three digits represents a decade, for example “the 1960s”. It is the ten-year time interval of those years where the three specified digits are the first three digits of the year. > Century: Two digits may be used to indicate the century which is the hundred year time interval consisting of years beginning with those two digits.
- nurtbo 2y agoThe aughts or naughts (or aughties) are a pretty easy to understand way to refer to 2000-2009, though saying “the early aughts” is clearly more verbose than saying 2000-2003 (except that 2000-2003 looks more specific than is meant)
- kelnos 2y agoI think that last point, "there’s no good way to refer to 2000-2009, sorry", was a bit tongue in cheek, refusing to acknowledge "the aughts", since it is a terrible, terrible, stupid way to refer to anything.
- BurningFrog 2y agoImmigrating from a country that uses "1700s", it probably took a decade before I had internalized to subtract 1 to get the real number. I will resent it till I die.
- bowsamic 2y agoI find it weird when people take a long time for these little things. My wife still struggles with the German numbers (85 = fünfundachtzig) and the half thing with time (8:30 = halb neun) even though I managed to switch over to those very quickly. I think it depends on the person how hard it is
- BurningFrog 2y agoI think this one was hard for me because centuries don't come up that often. If it was something I saw/heard every day, I would have adapted much faster.
- Too 2y agoHere we say something like the "ninteen-hundred-era" for the 1900s, "ninteen-hundred-ten-era", for 1910s, "ninteen-hundred-twenty-era", etc. In writing 1900-era, 1910-era, 1920-era. The most recent decades are referred to with only the "70-era" for the 70s. The word for age/epoch/era in our language is a lot more casual in this setting. The 20xx vs 200x does indeed leave some room for ambiguity in writing, verbally most people say 20-hundred-era vs 20-null-null-era.
- dinkumthinkum 2y agoResent is a little strong isn’t it? I feel like today we have such a victim culture that we are oppressed by the most trivial of matters.
- pentagrama 2y agoI got a fight recently with a philosophy teacher about that, I changed the dates like the op to be more clear on my writing, she took it so seriously, it was a big fight about clarity vs. tradition but really superficial and mean on both sides. Now I wish to be* more articulate and have a good debate. I wrote it in my way on the final exam and approved, she had to deal with it I guess. * Sorry, I don't know how to write that in past, like haber sido in Spanish, my main language.
- kingkawn 2y agoThis is pretty easy to understand if you try whatsoever
- transfire 2y agoWe just need a new word to mean “0-indexed count of centuries”. Not sure what a good word for this would be, but maybe just use what we already say — “hundreds”. So, in the late 17th hundreds, …
- frithsun 2y agoI am emotionally invested in having been born in "the twentieth century" instead of "the 1900s."
- szundi 2y agoResistance is futile
- bee_rider 2y agoI’ve just taken to writing things like: 201X or 20XX. This is non-standard but I don’t care anymore, referencing events from 20 years ago is just too annoying otherwise. In spoken conversation, I dunno, it doesn’t seem to come up all that often. And you can always just say “20 years ago” because conversations don’t stick around like writing, so the dates can be relative.
- tempodox 2y agoMeh. I acknowledge that the author can split a hair with their bare hand while blindfolded. But to convince everyone else they would have to lift the rest of the world to their level of pedantry.
- bowsamic 2y agoNo. I like the current system and I will continue to use it even if OP somehow manages to make everyone switch over, which they won’t manage to
- treve 2y agoThis was confusing to me as a kid, especially as we entered the 21st. I also still remember learning about the Dutch golden age in elementary school, but can't remember if it was the 1600s or 16th century. I'm running into a similar issue recently. Turns out that many people saying they are '7 months pregnant' actually mean they are in the 7th month, which starts after 26 weeks (6 months!)
- coldtea 2y ago>The issue, of course, is that “counted centuries” are off by one from how we normally interact with dates—the 13th century starts in AD 1201. There’s a simple solution. Avoid saying “the 18th century”, and say “the 1700s” instead. Besides being easier to understand, it’s also slightly shorter. The kind of person who cares and reads about "the Xth century" can also trivially understand the date range involved. The kind of person who can't tell 18th century is the 1700s and 21st century is 2000s, it would make them little good to read history, unless they get the basics of counting, calendars, and so on down.
- UberFly 2y agoAbout 20% would understand you. About 50% would tell you the 18th century was the 1800s, and 30% would just stare at you confused.
- Perseids 2y agoI'm sorry, but that is just elitist bullshit. First, even if we accept your implicit premise, that it is a training hurdle only, there is enormous value in accessible science, literature and education. In our connected society and in a democracy everyone benefits from everybody else understanding more of our world. In software engineering we have a common understanding that accidental complexity reduces our ability to grasp systems. It's no different here. Second, your implicit premise is likely wrong. Different people have different talents and different challenges. Concrete example: In German we say eight-and-fighty for 58. Thus 32798 gets two-and-three-thirty-seven-hundred-eight-and-ninety where you constantly switch between higher and lower valued digits. There are many people, me included that not-seldomly produce "Zahlendreher" – transposed digits – because of that, when writing those numbers down from hearing alone, e.g. 32789. But then, there are also people for whom this is so much of a non-issue that when they dictate telephone numbers they read it in groups of two: 0172 346578 becomes zero-one-seven-two-four-and-thirty-five-and-sixty-eight-and-seventy. For me this is hell, because when I listen to these numbers I need to constantly switch them around in my head with active attention. Yet others don't even think about it and value the useful grouping it does. My current thesis is that it is because of a difference between auditory and visual perception. When they hear four-and-thirty they see 34 in their head, whereas I parse the auditory information purely auditory. What I want you to take from my example, is that these issue might not be training problems alone. I have learned the German number spelling from birth and have worked in number intensive field and yet I continue to have these challenges. While I have not been deeply into history, I suspect that my troubles with Xth century versus x-hundreds might persist, or persist for a long time, even if I get more involved in the field.
- ggm 2y agoPick your battles. Is this easier or harder to win on than de-gendering romance languages? How about Americans stop with dropping the "and" in nineteen hundred AND twenty?
- UberFly 2y agoNineteen Twenty is just so much more to the point. Don't have time for those dang extra baggage words.
- psychoslave 2y agoI'm close to finish a linguistic project where I provide a different paradigm perspective, where gender is a subcategory of grammatical geste, and I give five additional flections to all nouns in French that refer to living entities which usually decline only under only two genders at most. Maybe I should start thinking about my next battle. :)
- nvader 2y ago> There’s no good way to refer to 2000-2009, sorry. "Noughty", Naughty!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dan-robertson 2y agoTerms like the ‘long 18th century’ feel like they make less sense when talking about 1700s. Though that mightn’t outweigh the confusion from the ordinals.
- ash 2y agoThe article does not really resolve the ambiguity with 2000s which usually means 2000-2009, not 2000-2099. That said, in Finnish language people never count centuries. It's always "2000-luku" and "1900-luku", not 21th and 20th.
- tetris11 2y ago> This leaves ambiguous how to refer to decades like 1800-1809. For these you should ~~specify the wildcard digits as “the 180*s” manually~~ write out the range. Please do not write “the 181st decade”. I think it wouldn't be wrong to say "the 1800s decade" or "the primus 2000s" or "the alpha 1900s"
- ash 2y agoI don't find it persuasive. First of all, people are not going to start writing and saying wildcards. Second, there is an established convention to say "2000s" and mean 2000-2009.
- tetris11 2y agono, that part was crossed out as a joke (hence my attempt to add '~' before and after the crossed out section)
- danschuller 2y agoIt means that now but that meaning will fade away as the decades advance.
- yard2010 2y agoThere are only 3 tough problems in engineering; 1) naming stuff 2) off by one errors
- psychoslave 2y agoA bit disappointing, as I was expecting something far more disruptive like an alternative calendar that makes century as a notion a useless tool. I wish we had some calendar with a departure point far less anthropocentric. So instead of all the genocides of Roman empire, each look at a calendar would be an occasion to connect to the vastness of the cosmos and the vacuity of all human endeavors in comparison to that.
- kazinator 2y ago> No one gets confused about what “the 1700s” means. Well, there are a few longtermists who do. Do you mean the 01700s? Or some other 1700s that have been cut to four digits for conversational convenience? :) When someone's salary depends on being confused, there are ways to dissuade them. But when it's their hobby, forget it.
- Y_Y 2y ago> Please do not write “the 181st decade”. Well now I have to
- aitium12 2y ago[dead]
- MobiusHorizons 2y ago> there's no good way to write 2000 - 2009 I have heard people use "the aughts" to refer to this time range [1]. I guess if I was trying to be specific about which century one could say "the two thousand aughts" or "the eighteen hundred aughts". But I think in that context i'd be more likely to say "in the first decade of the 1800s" 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aughts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aughts
- navane 2y agoI call them the two thousand zeroes (2000s). Or, when people ask me from which year my car is, I say two thousand zero -- emphasizing the smallest digit.
- PopAlongKid 2y agoWhy not twenty hundred for 2000, just like 1900 is nineteen hundred? Similarly, I never understood why people still say things like "two thousand ten" instead of twenty-ten for year 2010. No one ever went around saying "one thousand nine hundred ten" for 1910, did they?
- navane 2y agoI don't think they said ten hundred for the year 1000 either. I do use the twenty a for individual years though.
- avidphantasm 2y agoWe should also stop talking about decades for the purposes of periodization. For example, the “‘80s” arguably ran from the election of Reagan in 1980 to the appointment of Bush W. by the supreme court in 2000. Politically, economically, and culturally, the “90’s” were an elaboration on the “80’s” (e.g. the deregulation and market reforms of Clintonism just being a whitewashed expansion of what Reagan did).
- ineedaj0b 2y agoThe presidency of Bill Clinton was a much different time than that of Reagan in the US.
- navane 2y agoThe nineties clearly started in '89 with the fall of the Berlin wall and consequent "victory" of the cold war, and ended with the dotcom crash in 2000; the cyclical nature of economic growth wasn't bested after all.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ineedaj0b 2y ago"There’s no good way to refer to 2000-2009, sorry." I believe this time is called 'the aughts', at least online. I say it in person but I might be the outlier.
- shrimp_emoji 2y agoFuck that. It's "the 2000s".
- baobabKoodaa 2y agoI would have thought that extends beyond 2009
- saalweachter 2y agoWe don't need to refer to the third millennium as a whole right now, being in the first part of it. And by the time people need to refer to the 2000s, they will no longer have a reason to reference the 2000s. You can also refer to, in speech, the twenty-hundreds, without ambiguity; I suppose, if you want it more compact in text, you could always write the 20-00s.
- linearrust 2y agoThat only works for now because we are so close to 2000. So there is little ambiguity whether "the 2000s" refer to the century or the decade. But in the future, "the 2000s" will refer to the century. Just like the 1900s refer to the 20th century rather than the decade (1900-1909).
- wasmitnetzen 2y agoNot my problem, that can be fixed by a future generation of pedants. It'll be good enough for 50 years or so.
- Ylpertnodi 2y agoThe naughties.
- ivanwood 2y agoNobody* outside of these circles cares about these questions. And spend hours arguing about. * You know, these you wierdos call 'normies'
- carrja99 2y agoWe reset them every time a religious figure comes along anyway.
- cat_multiverse 2y agoGreat article, in my Master's and PhD despite being in a stodgy philological field I always opted for this for clarity and conciseness. It can be hard for people to let go because they want to sound clever. But oh, dear writer, slightly irksome that you learned copyediting but do not use en-dashes for your date ranges!
- elric 2y agoSaying stuff like "the seventeen hundreds" works in English, but it doesn't necessarily work in other languages. In Dutch that would be "de jaren zeventienhonderd", which sounds like crap compared to "de achtiende eeuw". > because they want to sound clever Citation needed. I've never considered "nth century" to be a product of trying to sound clever.
- afiori 2y agoThe obvious solution it to use a odd balanced numerical system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_ternary https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_ternary
- the__alchemist 2y agoConfusing convention. I think most pre teens realize this when learning history, then move on to accept it as a quirk. I would prefer we stop propagating it, as the author says. Don't accept confusing notation when a better alternative is also in common use!
- cabalamat 2y agoYou need to count from 0. 1 BC should be renamed year 0. Then the years 0-99 are the 0th century, the years 1900-1999 are the 19th century, etc. To avoid confusion between new style and old style centuries, create a new word, "centan", meaning "100 years" and use cardinal instead of ordinal numbers, for conciseness. Then the years 1900-1999 are the 19-centan.
- im3w1l 2y agoIt's always fun how to debate how to square circles, something has to give, but what? My proposed solution is to make the first "century" 99 years.
- _dain_ 2y agoThey should have names: - 1500s: The Columbian Century - 1600s: The Westphalian Century - 1700s: The Century of Enlightenment - 1800s: The Imperial Century - 1900s: The Century of Oil - 2000s: The Current Century (to be renamed in 2100) You might think it's Eurocentric, and you'd be right. But every language gets to name them differently, according to local history.
- TheAceOfHearts 2y agoAnother example of confusing numeric systems emerges from 12-hour clocks. For many people, asking them to specify which one is 12AM and which one is 12PM is likely to cause confusion. This confusion is immediately cleared up if you just adopt a 24-hour clock. This is a hill I'm willing to die on.
- runarberg 2y agoYou usually know it from context, and if not, 12 noon or 12 midnight is quite common. But I do wished people would stop writing schedules in the 12 hour system. You get weird stuff like bold means PM etc. to compensate for the space inefficiency of 12 hour system
- cvdub 2y agoThat’s why I always say “12 noon” when writing out scheduling instructions for something at 12PM.
- flakes 2y agoA few months ago, my girlfriend and I missed a comedy show because we showed up on the wrong day. The ticket said Saturday 12:15am, which apparently meant Sunday 12:15am, as part of the Saturday lineup. Still feel stupid about that one.
- wasteduniverse 2y agoThat sounds like their error. If the ticket said Saturday 2am, you wouldn't show up at Sunday 2am, right?
- rootusrootus 2y ago> just adopt a 24-hour clock. This is a hill I'm willing to die on. I don't know if I feel that strongly about it but I tend to agree. I see more value in adopting a 24 hour clock than making SI mandatory. AM/PM is silly.
- rbits 2y agoThat's not inherent to AM/PM, it's cause for some reason the AM/PM switches on the boundary of 11 to 12, not 12 to 1. To fix this while still having AM work with 24hr time, it should be 0 instead of 12
- istrice 2y agoThere is no such thing as a word for "1700s" in most European languages. Also in English it sounds weird, as you have to pronounce it "seventeen-hundreds" whereas the correct pronunciation is "one-thousand-seven-hundred". So 1700s is unsuitable for formal writing or speaking and doesn't map naturally to most languages of Western civilization. But yeah, I guess the author finds it hard to subtract 1 in his mind :) I could go off about the typical US-centric arrogance that I see on this site, but I think it's already pretty funny as it is.
- tyg13 2y agoSeventeen-hundreds doesn't sound stilted at all, to this native English speaker. I would use this even in a very formal context, and certainly no one would bat an eye. One-thousand-seven-hundreds is almost certainly incorrect in English -- I would actually find this to be a very clear marker of not speaking English very well. Are you a native speaker? I find your claims rather bold and quite frankly incorrect. Also, curious to find out (from elsewhere in this thread) is that Finnish does not typically use centuries. Rather, they use a construction that maps directly to 1700s (1700-luku). I would be careful in accidentally applying your own cultural bias when accusing others of the same ;)
- jonashus 2y agoIn Swedish it's also very rare to count centuries. We say 1700-talet. Also 2000-talet (pronounced either tvåtusen-talet/twothousand-talet or tjugohundra-talet/twentyhundred-talet) would mainly refer to 2000-2100. To refer to 2000-2009 we say 00-talet (nollnoll-talet/zerozero-talet).
- articlepan 2y agoSolution for 2000-2010: "the first decade of the 2000s". I realize this is counting by decades/centuries again, but if we just do it for the first decade/century under a larger span it's easy to read.
- ysofunny 2y agononetheless, typing out, and even saying "the first decade of the 2000s" takes too long we need something shorter, like the double-ohs "00s"
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dash2 2y agoI use "the 1900s" to mean 1900-1910. I understand the difficulty, but I don't think it is too terrible for us to get used to it and we aren't gonna change the past 500 years of literature that already did this. Also, it's ironic for a bunch of people who literally count arrays from zero to be complaining about this... :-P
- fsckboy 2y agocounting arrays from zero was C's contribution to the public consciousness (inherited from BCPL, and perhaps from ASM) people here generally hate C so it's triggering and they are trying to forget[1] [1] this wasn't a footnote, it was forget array index 1.
- hcfman 2y agoBecause humanity won’t make it through another century ?
- cvoss 2y agoThe same off-by-one annoyance under discussion bites the author in this very article and he didn't even notice: He calls 1776 the 76th year of the 18th century. But it's not! It's the 77th year of that century!
- bonzini 2y agoThe 18th century started in 1701 and ended in 1800.
- OJFord 2y agoI could give you 'ended in 1800' (I'd prefer 'at') but it very much started in 1700, not 1701.
- bonzini 2y agoI didn't make the convention. The 17th century started on January 1, 1701 and ended on December 31, 1800. That's because the purported year of the birth of Christ was the "first year of the lord", or AD 1, and that's when the first century started. In turn that's because at the time Latin had a word for nothing but not a word for zero, so you couldn't count years starting at zero. That also means that those old enough to have partied on December 31, 1999 were technically partying for the beginning of the last year of the second millennium.
- OJFord 2y agoOnly American Christians say 'year of our lord' after the date, if that's what that means to you and is how you want to think of it that's fine, but be aware nobody else is doing that, even though they're working in AD/BC.
- bonzini 2y ago"Year of the lord" (not "our" lord, please double check what I wrote) is the literal translation of Anno Domini and it's the reason why years are counted from one instead of zero. I quoted the expression, wrote "lord" in lowercase and added "purported" to make it clear that the religious reference was only for historical reasons, I don't know what else I could have done. If I wanted to imbue some religious meaning I probably would have said "Jesus" or "the Christ". I am also not American and not a native English speaker. In fact Latin languages say in expanded form "après Jésus-Christ", "dopo Cristo", "despues de Cristo" (abbreviation is only used in writing), so even speakers who are not religious very much know the reference even if they couldn't care less. We're stuck with it. I agree that it's more of a "who wants to be a millionaire" quirk than something that actually matters, but this case of correcting someone was one of the few cases where it matters.
- adolph 2y agoThe issue, of course, is that “counted centuries” are off by one from how we normally interact with dates—the 13th century starts in AD 1201. The author misses. The author would like to skip some significant interpretive steps, chiefly when our dynamically typed language uses number words or characters in different contexts. Suggested reading is about the differences between and use cases of nominal, ordinal, cardinal, interval and ratio. https://www.statisticshowto.com/probability-and-statistics/statistics-definitions/nominal-ordinal-interval-ratio/ https://www.statisticshowto.com/probability-and-statistics/s...