121–130 of 449 posts
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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.
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> 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.
That's not what the poster I originally responded to is saying. He's saying the 1st Century should start on a nonexistent day.
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On the other hand "1700s art" sounds like trash compared to "18th century art".
How 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.
(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)
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“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.
Another ambiguity, though perhaps less important, is that "2000s" could refer to 2000-2999.
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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 R…
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> 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.
On your sixth birthday we put a big 5 on your cake and call you a 5 year old all year. Can't say I've ever had to refer to someone's first year or first decade of their life, but sure I'd do that if it came up. Meanwhile, 0-indexed age comes up all the time.
“Birthday” really means “anniversary of the date of birth”.
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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…
Moreover, I definitely find the ordinality of pedantry more interesting than the pedantry of ordinality.