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Let's stop counting centuries

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Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#111

Post by burkaman »

jrockway wrote: post #58
gcp123 wrote: post #2

Author 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.

On the other hand "1700s art" sounds like trash compared to "18th century art".

I think that's good, because it helps you realize that categorizing art by century is kind of arbitrary and meaningless, and if possible it would be more useful to say something like "neoclassical art from the 1700s". "18th century" isn't an artistic category, but it kind of sounds like it is if you just glance at it. "Art from the 1700s" is clearly just referring to a time period.

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#112

Post by marc_abonce »

rcoveson wrote: post #76
Izkata wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The calendar goes from 1 BC to 1 AD, there is no year 0.

There is no year zero according to first-order pedants. Second-order pedants know that there is a year zero in both the astronomical year numbering system and in ISO 8601, so whether or not there is a year zero depends on context. It's ultimately up to us to decide how to project our relatively young calendar system way back into the past before it was invented. Year zero makes everything nice. Be like astronomers an…

> It's ultimately up to us to decide how to project our relatively young calendar system way back into the past before it was invented. Year zero makes everything nice. Be like astronomers and be like ISO. Choose year zero.

Or, just to add more fuel to the fire, we could use the Holocene/Human year numbering system to have a year zero and avoid any ambiguity between Gregorian and ISO dates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#113

Post by bitwize »

c0balt wrote: post #74
card_zero wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's reform Alex Trebek's name, it's difficult.

And while we are at it, Tim Apple

There 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.

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#114

Post by bitwize »

kstrauser wrote: post #23
milliams wrote: post #11

It'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 t…

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.

You are, in general, n-1 years old in your nth year. Only when you complete your nth year do you turn n years old.

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#115

Post by Terretta »

kergonath wrote: post #105
Terretta wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> who would even say that?

Writers.

And yes, cardinal versus ordinal is my point. The farther from the origin, the less people are likely to want them different.

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#116

Post by Dalewyn »

IshKebab wrote: post #87
mixmastamyk wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 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.

A 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".

For 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.

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#117

Post by Terretta »

kdmccormick wrote: post #99
Terretta wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What? No. When you are 0, it is your first year. When you are 21, you have begun your 22nd year. In the US you are legal to drink in your 22nd year of life. You are correct that nobody says "22nd year" in this context, but nobody says "21st year" either. The former is awkward but the latter is just incorrect.

> nobody says "21st year" either

On the contrary, enough people say it, it's a quora question:

https://www.quora.com/What-does-it-mean-to-be-in-your-twenty...

Authors love phrases like this. Which, in turn, comes from another ordinal/cardinal confusion stemming back to common law:

"A person who has completed the eighteenth year of age has reached majority; below this age, a person is a minor."

That means they completed being 17, but that's just too confusing, so people think you stop being a minor in your 18th year.

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#118

Post by lupire »

pdonis wrote: post #75
hgomersall wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said twice, whether that date actually existed or not is irrelevant.

> 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?

The first day of the 1st Century is Jan 1, 1 AD.

The point is that some days got skipped over the centuries, but there's no need to make the Centuries have weird boundaries.

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#119

Post by Unbefleckt »

mjmahone17 wrote: post #54
Uehreka wrote: post #32

Earlier 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…

Had no idea myself, my peers, my family and my community used archaic English.
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