Just exactly what was the time and date when you became a adolescent? An adult? Old-aged?
What date did the Renaissance begin?
If you think about it, there had to be a before and an after to such things. Therefore, there had to a moment of transition.
Help think of other such elusive moments.
(Nah, this isn’t a deadly serious issue. Just something to mull over and get crazy with.)
Now.
Renaissance - ah, beautiful art. You’ll get much debate to when the era started/ended.
Thanks, Blonde. BTW, I have a blonde cousin living in the DFW area, and automatically think of her when I see your name.
What I was shooting for – and obviously didn’t hit – was the specific moment when those events took place. Not just the year. Like, was it in the morning or afternoon or night on the 4th of June in 1977? That level of specific.
And, yes, I do expect debate over these issues.
What I was also hoping to get from others would be the same sorts of “eras” or “ages” that we always hear about (Golden Age, Dark Ages, Middle Ages, The Jazz Age, The Swing Era, yadda, yadda, yadda) but rarely get anything very specific about.
That make any better sense?
Gotcha. March 18, 1977.
I believe the U.S. economy’s recession was pegged at March 31, 2001. Ironically enough, that was the day my whole office was let go due to a merger (thankfully, with severance packages).
C’mon Blonde, dear. If you hit adolescence in 1977, it’s a bit early to be feeling old-aged. 
Some things have definitions that allow you to pinpoint a time and date, while I think most things have transitional periods. If you say adolescence begins on one’s 13th birthday, then it’s easy to say when one enters that age, but the physical changes associated with adolescence come at different times for different people.
WWII is generally accepted to have begun with the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, but there are people who eill argue that it really began with the Japanese in China in 1935, or with the Treaty of Versailles or with the Franco-Prussian War. Those were precursors, with a definite influence on the later coming of open conflict, but I’ll stick with 1939.
Other things, such as a cultural era, may be well under way before they’re recognized, and people do try to look back and identify roots of change. There you’re stuck with opinions.
Still other things are categorized and organized for the sake of study, and the lines of division are not arbitrary, but they can hardly be preciise. The Jurassic Period didn’t just start one day.
Every previous event to have ever have happened contributes to whatever event is happening right “now”. Therefore, any lines of division we impose are completely arbitrary and chosen only for momentary convenience.
Trigonal Planar
I won’t try to argue against your statements, but as Blonde suggests, there are those who attempt to locate a change in some process as occurring at some arbitrarily precise moment.
In the instance Blonde points to, it’s as though something happened on that date to trigger the recession.
While that may well be argued, too, as Ringo suggests, if we do accept that some specific unit of time (decade, year, hour, second) marks a turning point or a change of state, then what’s to prevent its being reduced to the smallest interval of time imaginable?
The main point I had in mind with this thread was to try to identify those things that do get pointed to as having some definite (even if not specified) beginning or ending and then to try to decide how precisely those turning points might be fixed.
Yes, it’s a silly notion, but does that mean it doesn’t have validity?
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Examples that come to mind:
The Watergate Era – was it the break-in, the planning of it, or something else that could be identified as “the start of it all”?
The 60’s – even though we could resolve that the 1960’s began either at midnight on Jan/1/1960 or Jan/1/1961 it would not be the moment when the events that are typically associated with the rebellious and restless nature of those times actually began. If we focus on the Hippie Movement as a subset of events of the 60’s, then we’d have to isolate the first Hippie’s appearance. And we might even have to decide where the last Beatnik left off and the first Hippie started, before we could attempt to pin down any date(s).
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Yes, historians arbitrarily lump spans of time without specified dates as being within some era or age and then proceed to attach all sorts of characteristics to events and cultures within those unspecified dates. But I have to wonder if much of that is just a clever way of disguising the “who knows?” aspect of such efforts to explain things.
One favored copout is “in the dim mists of history (or pre-history)” which just indicates that no reliable data have been found for better dating of things.
I’d just like to poke this balloon of hypocrisy a bit, all in a spirit of mental masturbation if nothing else.
Those game to help out can suggest other such periods or eras that seem wildly arbitrary or even bogus.
(I would have tried to say all this in the OP but figured I’d scare everybody away and nobody would respond. That can be tested by the number of replies after this.)
Adolescent – when I first liked a boy in that way.
Adult – when I moved out of my parents’ house (not when I got a job!)
Old Age – I don’t know yet, ask me later.