291–300 of 449 posts
But oh, dear writer, slightly irksome that you learned copyediting but do not use en-dashes for your date ranges!
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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…
Great article, in my Master's and PhD despite being in a stodgy philological field I always opted for this for clarity and conciseness. It can be hard for people to let go because they want to sound clever. But oh, dear writer, slightly irksome that you learned copyediting but do not use en-dashes for your date ranges!
> because they want to sound clever
Citation needed. I've never considered "nth century" to be a product of trying to sound clever.
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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…
First, let's get rid of miles and feet, then we could even discuss this.
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 :)
My original post got downvoted, but I stand by it because empirically, it seems to be clear: the current practice may not be perfect but has obviously stood the test of time. So let's move on, there's more important things to worry about.
> The issue, of course, is that “counted centuries” are off by one from how we normally interact with dates—the 13th century starts in AD 1201. There’s a simple solution. Avoid saying “the 18th century”, and say “the 1700s” instead. Besides being easier to understand, it’s also slightly shorter. The kind of person who cares and reads about "the Xth century" can also trivially understand the date range involved. The k…
I do tend to say "the XX00s", since it's almost always significantly clearer than "the (XX+1)th century". > There’s no good way to refer to 2000-2009, sorry. This isn't really an argument against the new convention, since even in the old convention there was no convenient way of doing so. People mostly just say "the early 2000s" or explicitly reference a range of years. Very occasionally you'll hear "the aughts".
The 2000-2009’s are the aughts!
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What? 0 is the year Jesus Christ was born.
No, jesus was born in 1AD
> Did the American revolution happen before, during, or after the Enlightenment? I’ve no idea. When did the American revolution happen? Not everyone’s cultural frame of reference is the same as yours. I can tell you when the Synod of Whitby happened, though.
It's tiresome when people seem to think it's necessary to be annoyed that others make reference to their own cultural frame of reference in their writing. Even more tiresome when they feel the need to comment about it. Most people here, even non-Americans, likely have at least a rough idea of when the American Revolution was. And those who don't will either just gloss over it and think no more of it, or find the answ…
The article is "Here's a thing I don't understand! Let's say how silly it is by comparing it to a thing I do understand."
I mean, thanks for that. I could write an article about "Why do people insist on quoting the American revolution as a reference date when they could just say 'late 18th century'". Which would make the same point and get us precisely as far along as this article did.
> Look at the time I've bothered to waste typing this out!
I feel the same way, dude. I feel exactly the same.