When saying the year 2014 we often say “2-oh-14.”
Did our forebears pronounce the zero in “1901” as “oh,” “zero,” “naught,” or something else, and is there a connection with the newfangled typewriters of the period not having keys for “1” or “0”, relying instead on the lower-case L and upper-case O to suffice?
In other words, did Americans start saying “oh” instead of “naught” due to the rise of typewriter keyboard limitations?
We do? This is the first I’ve heard that form.
Same here. Never heard it that way. That said, the etymology of “oh” to mean zero sounds like an interesting question. This site has some sort of answer, but I can’t tell whether it’s saying it dates back to the 1500s (or possibly 1400s) or if it’s just the early 1900s.
(As a quick aside, I always found it kind of odd that in the City of Chicago, before they changed the city vehicle stickers, they would have the serial number of the sticker both in Arabic numeral form, and under each numeral would be the English word equivalent. But the word form for “0” was “cipher,” which I never understood why they picked such an old-fashioned/out-dated term. Outside of the city vehicle sticker and perhaps some literary references, I don’t ever recall “0” being rendered as “cipher” in any sort of modern context.)
I’ve never heard anyone say “Two oh one four”, not ever.
Welcome to the SDMB, libroshombre. In addition to “oh,” “zero,” and “naught” (sometimes spelled, “nought,” as in “noughts and crosses,” a Britishism for tic tac toe), you can also find references to “aught.” In The Music Man, for instance, Professor Hill claims to have graduated from the Gary Conservatory in “Aught Five” (1905).
That said, I have to join everyone else in saying I’ve never heard anyone say “Two oh one four” (or “Two oh fourteen,” which strikes my ear as really stilted). With respect to your actual question, I think pulykamell’s link is probably the best in the thread so far.
Stick around though; there are a lot of really learned individuals here, and we might all find out a thing or two before this thread ends.
Another person who hasn’t heard anyone say 2-oh-1-4 or 2-oh-14. I generally use two thousand fourteen myself but I occasionally hear twenty fourteen.
I can remember hearing dates like nineteen-oh-one or eighteen-oh-five being used back when I was a kid, which was before the personal computer era. But I don’t predate the typewriter so I can’t say what was common back then.
No one I know, or on the radio, TV, etc, pronounces it like that. Always twenty fourteen here.
Going on from that; the first decade seems to have almost universally become the ‘noughties’, but what will this decade be called?
Am I being whooshed, or is that true? (If true, is it a regionalism?). I’ve never heard anything like that, except in Cecil’s 1990s speculative column on the subject, where he jokes about the “naughty aughties.”
In my experience (US), the first decade of this century is generally referred to as the “two thousands,” and the current one the “twenty-tens,” or sometimes just the “tens.”
Very occasionally, I’ve heard the first decade called the “oh-ohs.”
In military and emergency services radio transmissions it is very clear that “Oh” is a letter and “Zero” is a number. They are not interchangeable. I had a hard time breaking recruits from saying
“Oh 500” instead of “Zero 500” when referring to 5:00am.
In various threads I have repeatedly asserted that we will do exactly what we did in the twentieth century. Avoid the need to name the decade for another five or ten years, and then start referring to it as the “turn of the century”.
I have actually seen a few uses of this in the wild already. I also hear references to the early 1900s as the “turn of the twentieth century” – acknowledging the usage by having to specify the earlier event.
I’ve never heard the year expressed in this way.
Twenty fourteen is what I hear all the time. never heard yours.
Maybe only in the UK - but it seems to be spreading through the popular media.
Never heard 2-oh-1-4. I always hear “twenty-fourteen,” which grates on my ears, or the more proper (to my mind) “two thousand fourteen.”
But I wonder if the OP inadvertently picked this year as a poor example (even though he claims to hear this all the time). His mention of 1901 makes me think if he really just means the 0 in years like 1901, 1708 etc. Did our ancestors say “oh”? Or was it “naught” or something else?
In * Persuasion* by Jane Austen, one of the characters, speaking probably in the latter part of the first decade of the 19th century, recollects something that occurred “in the year four”, i.e. in 1804.
I002O4I80
Translation:
I ought nought to owe for I ate nothing
I feel the same way. For the first decade I just said two-thousand two, two-thousand three etc.) and when we hit 2010 for some reason I continued saying two-thousand ten, eleven, twelve etc. For myself, I think that being a Gen-Xer because I heard future years referred to as twenty-ten or twenty-thirty-five so much throughout my childhood that now that they’re actually here it just sounds corny & dumb & hipster-retro to say it that way.
I won’t live to see it, but I ***do ***think that in the next century (the 2100’s) people will say twenty-one oh three and twenty-one twelve etc. Saying two-thousand one hundred *something *is just too long & awkward…
I have never heard 2-oh-14 either. Usually twenty-fourteen or, rarely, two thousand fourteen. But what I think I did used to hear something like two-oh-oh-five, or twenty-oh-five.
But the real question of when oh became a synonym for zero is interesting and I don’t know. Funny I do recall using l for 1, but I don’t remember using O for 0.
2014 here, I join the chorus in proclaiming I’ve NOT heard the ‘2-oh-1-4’ thingy at all. I didn’t initially even recognize it as the year when I read the thread title.
As others have said, I’ve never heard 2-oh-14. Only twenty-fourteen and two-thousand-and-fourteen. Never heard it without the “and”; that sounds weird to me.
As for “zero”, “oh”, or “naught”, I usually just say “oh”. I don’t know what Americans most commonly say or said in the past.