271–280 of 449 posts
It's funny that for me it feels right to associate the 20s with 2020 and the 40s with 1940, but somehow, the 30s is very foreign, and I can't think of 1930 or 2030 either.
Funny, when you say "20s" I think of the 1920s (aka the "Roaring 20s" here in the US). I wonder if it's an age thing (I'm in my 40s), or perhaps a cultural or regional thing. The 30s as 1930s seems pretty solid to me: US Great Depression, start of WWII, not to mention many of the smaller conflicts that led up to it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This reminds me that centuries such as "the third century BC" are even harder to translate into date ranges. That one's 201 BC to 300 BC, inclusive, backward. Or you might see "the last quarter of the second millennium BC", which means minus 2000 to about minus 1750. [Edit: no it doesn't.] In fact archeologists have adapted to writing "CE" and "BCE" these days, but despite that flexibility I've never seen somebody wr…
Some people have proposed resetting year 1 to 10,000 years earlier. The current year would be 12024. This way you can have pretty much all of recoded human history in positive dates, while still remaining mostly compatible with the current system. It would certainly be convenient, but I don't expect significant uptick any time soon. For earlier dates "n years ago" is usually easier, e.g. "The first humans migrated to…
Well 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.
The author's point is that idioms change, and this one should.
Use “the 1700s” and the like for all other cases.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> 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).
But I think this also illustrates just how averse our culture is to using zero-indexing in counts: The age number absolutely is zero-indexed - a baby before before the first birthday is zero years old. But no one calls it like that, instead we drop the year count entirely and fall back to the next-largest nonzero unit, i.e. we say the baby is so-and-so-many months old. And for newborns not yet a month old, we count in weeks, etc.
I think, culturally, it's not that surprising as this method of counting is older than the entire concept of "zero". But I think it shows that there is little hope of convincing a large number of non-nerd people to start counting things with zeros.
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.
No one that I know of in Europe gets taught this
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.
Why not just fix the calendar to match what people expect?
There was no time when people said "this is year 1 AD". That numbering was created retroactively hundreds of years later. So we can also add year 0 retroactively.
We should also stop talking about decades for the purposes of periodization. For example, the “‘80s” arguably ran from the election of Reagan in 1980 to the appointment of Bush W. by the supreme court in 2000. Politically, economically, and culturally, the “90’s” were an elaboration on the “80’s” (e.g. the deregulation and market reforms of Clintonism just being a whitewashed expansion of what Reagan did).