The “new” millennium, by popular consensus, began Jan 1, 2000. It will last 1,000 years and end on Dec 31st, 2999.
As with nearly all language the term is entirely arbitrary.
Pedants who waited until the end of the year 2000 to celebrate the new millennium made two tragic mistakes. I wrote about this at the time but few listened.
Their first mistake was the notion that because exactly 2,000 “years” had not passed since the start of the current calendar, Jan 1 2000 was not an acceptable starting point. It is true that exactly 2000 years had not passed. What is equally true is that neither was the stroke of midnite on Dec 31, 2000 a marker of exactly 2000 rotations of the earth around the Sun, for an assortment of astronomical reasons. What we call a “year” is quite arbitrary, and the length of an astronomical year changes over time (see here, for instance Year - Wikipedia ). Once you have established that a year is an arbitrary term reflecting the convenience of linguistic shorthand, you are equally free to define 1st, 2nd and 3rd milleniums arbitrarily. If you fall back on actual exact measurements you will not arrive at midnite Dec 31, 2000 as your exact completion of 2000 astronomical years. So although you mock the polloi, you yourself are also in error.
Their second mistake was hooking up their cart of knowledge to the donkey of ignorance by pleading historical events. The current calendar has been a hit-or-miss affair with various tweakings by assorted authorities over the last 2000 years or so in an effort to improve its accuracy and keep it from wandering too far off the solar mark, because it has been fundamentally flawed. I myself remember the bitter arguments I had in 1582 with my Catholic buddies about whether or not I could celebrate my birthday on October 5th.
The 90’s are the…90’s. And so on, except for the first decade which got screwed. It doesn’t really matter; after 2000+ years we still don’t know what to call the first decade of any century anyway.
This is one of the times when it’s extra tricky to be a pedant cuz the polloi have blundered on the correct term and to be correct you must side with them. Plus their party for the turn of the millennium put the pedants’ millennium celebration to shame.
Back around 1995, it became clear to me that a lot of people were going to be celebrating the start of the 21st century a year early, on January 1, 2000. At the time, I assumed the newspapers and network news divisions would do their job and inform people of the correct date (as newspapers did a century earlier). However, to my disgust, they pretended that popular opinion could somehow alter the reality of simple arithmetic, such that 1 + 2000 = 2000. Pandering, ignorance-mongering asses.
I’ve seen this sort of nitwittery in many other cases involving years. For instance, my local paper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, recently had an article about the 50th anniversary of the Frisbee. The headline read, “Frisbee sails into its 50th year”. No, jackass; its 51st year.
Back in September 1999, the tv show “Saturday Night Live” was entering its 25th season. I remembered watching its premier in 1975. So what did they call the season premier? “Our 25th Anniversary!” At first I thought it was a joke, but apparently not. Eric Idle was hosting, and later in an interview I heard him admitting that he was baffled why they were calling their 24th anniversary their 25th.
It isn’t General Relativity; it’s addition and subtraction of small integers. Why does this keep coming up?
A person who just turned 30 has already lived 30 years. This person would be in their 30’s and would be a year into their 3rd decade (since decade 1 was 0-9, decade 2 was 10-19, and decade 3 was 20-29.
A 29 year old is already in the last year of their 3rd decade.
A baby’s first year isn’t complete until they turn one year old in which time they have already lived a full year.
I don’t know if I’m agreeing with you or disagreeing. :dubious:
Further, a child who is 4 years old is in their 5th year of existence.
This is all different than the calendar year issue of the OP. The calendar years start with 1, not 0 like our birth years, this is where the confusion is.
As far as Cecil’s column;
Simply stated, since we started with the number 1 (year one) we need to get to year ten before the tenth year can be completed. Since we didn’t start with 0 (year one) we need to flip to the next set of ten (in our numbering system) to show the completion of the tenth year, that would be number 11. The start of year 11 would be the completion of the first ten years and the start of the next decade.
2001 should have been the official start of the millennium.
'Tis not. 1000 years is not arbitrary. The rest of your post is merely reverse logic used in an attempt to reinforce your point.
Again, if you start with 1 (the number one), you will not have completed counting to 1000 until you actually say the number (spoken) one-thousand. That will be the end of counting to your first thousand. To start the next thousand you must actually say the number one-thousand-and-one. Agree?
It is really more a matter of that pesky definite versus indefinite article.
“A” millennium is any period of 1000 years. “The” millennium is not really specified but each individual has their own definition.
Centuries are easier to talk about but the principle holds:
A century is 100 years.
The 20th century (by common reference) started 1/1/1901 and ended 12/31/2000.
The nineteen hundreds (by common reference) started 1/1/1900 and ended 12/31/1999.
Everyone is right except the ones who insiste that only they are right.
Saying that a new millenium started on 1/1/2000 is, of course correct. But a newer millenium started on 1/2/2000, another the very next MINUTE of the same day, etc. Any millenium is totally arbitrary, as many have pointed out.
Where these pedants fail in their analysis of the problem of 1/1/2000 is that the millenium in question wasn’t just ANY millenium. It was the THIRD millenium. To be in your third millenium, you have to have finished your first two. Thus, 2000 years have to have come and gone. That did not happen until midnight, 1/1/2001.
Who the fuck cares what the common Joe is willing to call a thing?? The common masses can be conditioned into almost anything, including opposing, then supporting, then opposing again the same war, believing that white patent leather belts and shoes are fashionable, and that people with a different skin color are somehow inferior. If you are willing to live your life by what the mass of people are lead into doing, best of luck, oh spineless ones… :rolleyes:
And in the same spirit, if you are willing to live your life believing everybody else in the world is wrong and you alone know what reality is, best of luck, oh delusional one…
The definition of 1000 years is entirely arbitrary because there are a number of ways to define what a year is, to various levels of precision. Follow the link I gave. It is the arbitrariness of the definition of a year that produces the arbitrariness of the definition of 1000 years.
Under none of those definitions did exactly 1000 years (defining, for example, a year as the revolution of the earth around the sun) pass at the stroke of midnite on Dec 31, 2000. That’s why pedants cannot congratulate themselves on the correctness of their (pitiful) millennial celebration.
If you are going to pick nits the best you can hope for is to argue that you were closer to 1000 years. Fine, but your pedantry is then subservient to the next pedant over who gets it even more precise, and what’s the fun of being a pedant unless you can be exactly right? There is a Chief Pedant only. Everyone else is in second place. Get in line.
I have no idea what “reverse logic” is, btw. Have at it with the last word here. I have already told you what the correct usage is.
Since when is zero a counting number? The first year is year 1. The first day is day 1. Remember, we are *counting *years, decades, centuries, millennia, not *naming *them.
If you have ten minutes to solve a puzzle, what minute are you in after the first 30 seconds? Clearly it is the first minute. Surely not the second. And the zero minute does not exist.
How many checkbooks start with check #0? If I owe you ten dollars, will you accept the zero dollar as partial payment?
By your definition, a ten minute puzzle only lasts nine minutes, check #1 is the second check, and no time has passed after 59 seconds of cogitating.
The problem with the niggling pedants is that because 1BC was not named 0, that the first decade, century and millennium are lacking a year. For some reason, the solution for them has never simply been to include 1BC in the first millennium, and let the BC centuries worry about the deficit of a year. Instead, we get this silliness about how we should have celebrated the new millennium a year later.
I am baffled as to why that’s supposed to make sense to anyone.
Strictly speaking, no, it isn’t. However, the notion that 1000 years bears, in and of itself, any more significance than any other amount of time is very much arbitrary. 1000 years is no more or less arbitrary a unit than 1001 or 997 or 342 except for the fact that its representation in decimal counting systems makes it nice and round and pretty. Therefore, by extension, any marks achieved by and/or derived from counts and multiples of that arbitrary measure are themselves equally arbitrary.
Me, I don’t care about the 1930s or the 17th century or anything else. I prefer to build my interpretation of history around the Prime Years.
In other words, you want to pretend that 1 BC is “AD” because it will make your mistake go away. And eleven eggs make a dozen if you count zero eggs as one egg.
But you’re neither using common sense nor logic. Counting from 1 instead of from 0 is not some newfangled way of doing things, and it’s not a mistake by the creators of the Julian/Gregorian calendar. As I pointed out it’s not unique to the calendar, it’s been the common way to count age in many times and places.
The argument that this doesn’t matter as related to the millennium, because of common usage today is valid, even if my personal opinion is that using the actual definition of the calendar is “more” correct.
Arguing that using the basic definitions of the calendar, and, as you’re doing, that the entire concept of starting the count at one, is dumb and ridiculous, is the very anti-thesis of fighting ignorance.
??
A one year old kid can be anywhere from 12 months to 24 months old, even though, clearly, they are in their second year of existence on the planet, no?
A two year old (from 24-36 months) is in their third year but is only still called “two”. What’s the problem here?
Yes, I think Cecil is not understanding the normal human perspective, as opposed to the nerdling perspective that is ultra-precise. I count myself as one of those nerdlings, but I do see this issue as one of semantics. For normal people, the 70’s ranged from January 1, 1970 to December 31, 1979. And the real celebration about the millenium was the change of that 19 to a 20. 2001 is just a number, but the change from 19 to 20 was a revolution. It is quite possible that 2~ will be the start of the year numbering system for the next 1000 years, and we were there to see it change. All of our lives were back there before 2000, and there was something spiritual about the feeling that we had just passed into a new and different place. 2001 was just more of the same, but 2000 was an original.
To muddle the point further, in some cultures, a baby comes out of its mother at age 1. (not that it’s a 1 year old, it’s just they start counting from age 1)
