I 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.
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Let's stop counting centuries
101–110 of 449 posts
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#102I 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
Many people find their own thoughts more interesting than the ones of others. Some write. Many don't.
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Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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).
“Half one” is archaic English, and common German, for 12:30. Similarly “my 27th year” just sounds archaic to me: I wonder if you went through a bunch of 19th century writing if you’d see ages more often be “Xth year” vs “X-1 years old”. There may be something cultural that caused such a shift, like a change in how math or reading is taught (or even that it’s nearly universally taught, which changes how we think and s…
Isn’t “half one” used as a short form of “half past one” these days, I.e. 01:30? That has been a source of confusion for someone used to the Germanic way.
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#104Author 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
Incorrect, this answer wasn't given in the form of a question ;)
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don't 0-index people's ages. There are a million books about "baby's first year", while they're still 0 years old.
Except we do, as soon as we need the next digit. In "figure of speech", or conventual use, people start drinking in their 21st year, not their 22nd. In common parlance, they can vote in their 18th year, not their 19th. We talk of a child in their 10th year as being age 10. Might even be younger. Try asking a people if advice about a child in their "5th year of development" means you're dealing with a 5 year old. Most…
> In "figure of speech", or conventual use, people start drinking in their 21st year, not their 22nd. In common parlance, they can vote in their 18th year, not their 19th.
That’s not the case, though. They can vote (and drink, in quite a few countries) when they are at least 18 years old, not when they are in their 18th year (who would even say that?)
People are 18 years old (meaning that 18 years passed since their date of birth) on their 18th birthday. There is no need of shoehorning 0-based indexing or anything like that.
> Most will say yes.
Most people say something stupid if you ask tricky questions, I am not sure this is a very strong argument. Have you seriously heard anybody talking about a child’s “5th year of development”, except maybe a paediatrician? We do talk about things like “3rd year of school” or “2nd year of college”, but with the expected (1-indexed) meaning.
> So perhaps it's logical to count from zero when there's no digit in the magnitude place, because you haven't achieved a full unit till you reach the need for the unit. Arguably a baby at 9 months isn't in their first year as they've experienced zero years yet!
It’s really not. To have experienced a full year, you need a year to have passed, which therefore has to be the first. I think that’s a cardinal versus ordinal confusion. The first year after an event is between the event itself and its first anniversary. I am not aware of any context in which this is not true, but obviously if you have examples I am happy to learn.
> It's unsatisfying, but solves the off by one errors, one of the two hardest problems in computer science along with caching and naming things.
Right. I know it is difficult to admit for some of us, but we are not computers and we do not work like computers (besides the fact that computers work just fine with 1-indexing). Some people would like it very much if we counted from 0, but that is not the case. It is more productive to understand how it works and why (and again cardinals and ordinals) than wishing it were different.
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course, they are important, but so are many other things - and speaking e.g. from a European POV, a lot of other events are simply much more salient and commonplace - and the same is probably even more true for other continents (would a random reasonably educated American or European person know when the Meiji restauration happened or when Latin America became independent?). You can't expect everyone to have memor…
America was a backwater at the time and therefore the best place to experiment with European enlightenment ideals. Which it did, and was a direct factor in the French Revolution. I also learned about numerous revolutions in Latin America from Mexico to Bolivar to San Martin over the early 1800s. The events that directly affect the modern world should be covered in school. I’d say revolutions that created large modern…
Of course, we learn about the American Revolution in schools, but people aren't going to remember every date they were taught in schools. The founding of Rome or the Punic Wars are also hugely important for today's world, but not everyone can place them.
The reason most US Americans probably can place the American Revolution is because I assume it's so often commememorated there. In Germany, people would be much more likely to remember the years 1933, 1949 and 1989, because of how often they're referenced.
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course, they are important, but so are many other things - and speaking e.g. from a European POV, a lot of other events are simply much more salient and commonplace - and the same is probably even more true for other continents (would a random reasonably educated American or European person know when the Meiji restauration happened or when Latin America became independent?). You can't expect everyone to have memor…
America was a backwater at the time and therefore the best place to experiment with European enlightenment ideals. Which it did, and was a direct factor in the French Revolution. I also learned about numerous revolutions in Latin America from Mexico to Bolivar to San Martin over the early 1800s. The events that directly affect the modern world should be covered in school. I’d say revolutions that created large modern…
> I’d say revolutions that created large modern states would be among them.
The Russian revolution as well. And the Chinese one. It’s quite difficult to make sense of the late 20th century (yes, I know) without them. Or the early 21th.
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#108> 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.
In the USA we say “the aughts”
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#109Meh, too small of an issue to be bothered about it.
small 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 :)
> 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.
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> On your sixth birthday we put a big 5 on your cake and call you a 5 year old all year. If you are going to be that pedantic, I would point out that one only has one birthday. (Well, unless one's mother is extremely unlucky.)
"Birthday" does not mean the same thing as "date of birth".
Well regardless the number we constantly use is 0-indexed.