Meh, too small of an issue to be bothered about it.
Let's stop counting centuries
31–40 of 449 posts
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#32It's easy, we should have simply started counting centuries from zero. Centuries should be zero-indexed, then everything works. We do the same with people's ages. For the entire initial year of your life you were zero years old. Likewise, from years 0-99, zero centuries had passed so we should call it the zeroth century! At least this is how I justify to my students that zero-indexing makes sense. Everyone's fought t…
> 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).
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#33Meh, 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 :)
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#34[flagged]
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#35Another ambiguity, though perhaps less important, is that "2000s" could refer to 2000-2999.
Could make the convention to say "the twenty hundreds" when referring to [2000, 2100), and "the two thousands" for [2000, 3000).
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#36It's easy, we should have simply started counting centuries from zero. Centuries should be zero-indexed, then everything works. We do the same with people's ages. For the entire initial year of your life you were zero years old. Likewise, from years 0-99, zero centuries had passed so we should call it the zeroth century! At least this is how I justify to my students that zero-indexing makes sense. Everyone's fought t…
> 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.
The first year of life is the year indexed with zero, just like the first centimeter/inch in a ruler is the centimeter/inch indexed with zero
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#37[flagged]
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#38I 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!
I think you mean "twenty-aughts" (to differentiate them from the nineteen-aughts, 1900-1909).
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#39Sure, then we can switch to French Revolutionary metric time.
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#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 looking for.