131–140 of 449 posts
I thought this article was railing against the lumping together of entire spans of hundreds of years as being alike (ie, we lump together 1901 and 1999 under the name ”the 1900s” despite their sharing only numerical similarity), and was interested until I learned the author’s real, much less interesting intention
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!
A lot of this runaround is happening because people get hung up on the fact that the "AD" era began as AD 1. But that year is not magic--it didn't even correlate with the year of Jesus's birth or death. So let's just start the AD era a year before, and call that year "AD 0". It can even overlap with BC 1. BC 1 is the same as AD 0. Fine, we can handle that, right? Then the 00s are [0, 100), 100s are [100, 200), etc. Z…
Things like "17th century", "1600s", or "1990s" are rarely exact dates, and almost always fuzzy. It really doesn't matter what the exact start and end day is. If you need exact dates then use exact dates. A calendar change like this is a non-starter. A lot of disruption for no real purpose other than pleasing some pedantics.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 2000-2009’s are the aughts!
I think you mean "twenty-aughts" (to differentiate them from the nineteen-aughts, 1900-1909).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we should have simply started counting centuries from zero Latin, like Lua, is 1-indexed.
I feel like the Romans had an excuse for that mistake. Not sure about Lua.
> starting in 1776, not in the 76th year of the 18th century.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Appeal to ignorance and anti-intellectualism, congrats.
We only have so many hours in a day and so many days in a lifetime, while knowledge is practically infinite.
I think this is incorrect. Don't centuries start with the 00? In that case the first year of a century is 0, and the 76th year would be 75, not 76 as the author writes: > starting in 1776, not in the 76th year of the 18th century.