Let's stop counting centuries
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Let's stop counting centuries
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Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#2Author 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
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.
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#3[deleted]
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#4Well 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.
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#5[deleted]
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#6Author 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 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.
The right answer was, and still is: Jan 1, 1901
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#71800-1899 is the eighteen-hundreds, 1800-1809 is the eighteen-noughties. Easy.
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#8One point, the singular they has been in use for centuries, where this essay suggests it's a recent invention.
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#9> 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.) 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 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/.
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#10Another ambiguity, though perhaps less important, is that "2000s" could refer to 2000-2999.