I notice in this column that people who insist that a new century starts in the year …01, not the year …00 are now being called ‘pedants.’ And by somebody who obviously knows how to count, too. I expect better from Cecil and his minions.
Is this the column you are commenting on? link
It was. Sorry I forgot to put in the link.
The item in question is a Straight Dope Staff Report written by Karen, not one of the Straight Dope columns, which are written by Cecil Adams. Accordingly, I’ll move this thread to the Comments on Staff Reports forum.
bibliophage
moderator CCC
Overlooked that also. Sorry.
But who says that pedantry is bad?
I think pedant is an entirely appropriate term. It doesn’t imply that they’re wrong - quite the contrary, in fact.
Still seems odd to use it there, though. Surely nobody but pedants would be reading the column in the first place.
It doesn’t imply that they’re wrong, no, but at least around here their is a bit of a pejorative air attached to the term. The column in question is a good example of that.
Having said that, in my opinion there is nothing pedantic at all about stating that 1 is the first number in a counting series.
I’m having a hard enough time adjusting to being 41. If you want to insist I refer to this as my 42nd year instead, I think my minor midlife crisis would explode.
(Yes, birthdays as commonly celebrated are an example where 1 is NOT the first counting number. )
In Britain, the ground floors of buildings are numbered 0. Therefore, you take the staircase to the first floor.
In England, I was confused when I walked into the ground floor of a building but press 1 to go up to the first floor.
The ground floor-first floor ambiguity can be useful in large buildings built on sloped ground. That way, you can walk straight in through the doors on one end, and be on the first floor, just like normal, and you can walk straight in through the doors on the other end, and be on the ground floor, just like normal.
I’m not sure that’s accurate. Your first birthday celebrates the completion of your first year of life. It answers the question “How many years old am I?”
In your case, you are in your 42nd year, but you have not completed it. So if the question is "How many (whole) years old is scarbrow, the answer is 41. if the question is “How many years has **scarbrow **begun?” the answer is 42.
My understanding of why there is no 0(zero) AD is that the first year of what was once thought to be Christ’s life was numbered 1 A.D. That is the usual answer given to why a “century” starts in the first year numerically (ex. 2001). Whereas when I number my life, there is a year zero, the year before I turned 1 year old. My new century starts the day I turn 100 years old.
(The fact that Christ was born earlier is immaterial to this discussion. Lets just pretend A.D is celebrating someone else birth.)
Am I misunderstanding something here? As a former math major, the BC to AD transition is a bit maddening.
That’s right. It does. And if you were numbering the years, you would be *in *year 101 S.B. (scabrow) You will *be *101 years old when that year is over.
The thing that confuses some people (not you necessarily) is that they think that historical time is represented by a number line, with a zero between one and negative one. That’s not the case. A.D. and B.C. are arbitrary. You could pick any year in history and call it Year One. There really is no transition that is different from the transition between any two years.
If this was anything but years, I don’t think people would get so confused. A century is 100 whole years. Years were numbered starting with one, just like most other things we count. If the second century started in the year 100, then the first century would only have 99 years in it. This is really simple stuff.
A dollar is a hundred pennies. Does your second dollar start with your 100th penny, or your 101st?
You don’t even have to bring in Christ. The only things that matter are that[ul]
[li]the first year of the AD (or CE) era is number 1, and[/li][li]a “century” means 100 of something (syntactically, it works just like “a pair” or “a dozen”).[/li][/ul]
And my actual point is that this is arbitrary, and feels a bit silly. I think in most situations, people count how old something is, not which year it’s in. (OK, except maybe marketing speak, “As we begin our 5th year in business…”).
Wikipedia tells me that Astronomical time has a Year Zero, so I can feel justified in saying that 2000 was the beginning of the astronomical millennium, and others can say 2001 is the start of the AD millennium, and we can both be right.
This discussion has turned into exactly the occiasional totally off-topic mayhem that I hoped for. 
Thank you all.
The reason that people get confused is because they don’t realize that ‘0’ isn’t really a number like ‘1’, ‘2’, or what have you. It’s just a sort of tipping point between positive and negative numbers. That’s why you can’t divide by ‘0’ in my totally unmathemaical point of view.
When people are trying to sound older than they are, they might say they’re starting their xth year. They may say, “I’m catching up to 16” when they’re really 15.
My grandfather has been calling my grandmother 90 for 6 months now even though she’s really 89 until Monday. He’s been calling himself 86 even though he’s 85 until the middle of October. They like to impress people with how good they look at what sounds like an advanced number of years. They really do look 20 years younger, so when he says she’s NINETY, they go WOW!