Let's stop counting centuries • Hacker News Board

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#181

Post by kelnos » Sat, Jul 06, 2024, 5:09 AM UTC

runarberg wrote: post #40

> 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 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 lookin…

I'm not sure why, but every time I hear someone use that term, I cringe. The word just feels... off... to me for some reason. Like it's an abomination.

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#182

Post by szundi » Sat, Jul 06, 2024, 5:26 AM UTC

Resistance is futile

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#183

Post by bee_rider » Sat, Jul 06, 2024, 5:29 AM UTC

I’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.

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#184

Post by transfire » Sat, Jul 06, 2024, 5:31 AM UTC

We 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, …

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#185

Post by frithsun » Sat, Jul 06, 2024, 5:32 AM UTC

I am emotionally invested in having been born in "the twentieth century" instead of "the 1900s."

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#186

Post by bumbledraven » Sat, Jul 06, 2024, 5:53 AM UTC

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 "22nd year" in this context

You sure?

“He was born in the summer of his 22nd year…”

https://genius.com/John-denver-rocky-mountain-high-lyrics

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#187

Post by tempodox » Sat, Jul 06, 2024, 5:55 AM UTC

Meh. 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.

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#188

Post by bowsamic » Sat, Jul 06, 2024, 6:04 AM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #174

Immigrating 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.

I 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

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#189

Post by bowsamic » Sat, Jul 06, 2024, 6:05 AM UTC

OmarShehata wrote: post #33

kleiba wrote: post #31

Meh, 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 :)

> small issues are easy to solve!

Citation heavily needed

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#190

Post by tempodox » Sat, Jul 06, 2024, 6:05 AM UTC

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.

Logic 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.