It’s officially the New Year, and one of my few resolutions for the next 365 days (edit: my only resolution) is to dump the clumsy ‘two thousand and’ from the beginning and finally adopt the ‘twenty,’ as in, ’20-10′, or “2010: The Year We Make Contact.” Excuse that esoteric reference, but it’s a long time coming.
When I did some Googling on the issue I was surprised to see a lot of places talking about the same idea, specifically why we didn’t start out this decade by calling it ‘twenty-hundred’ or ‘twenty-hundred and one’, like the past ten centuries have come to be known. The answer? In short: the media.
True, there are many other extenuating factors like the awkward sound of ‘twenty-hundred,’ or the new sexiness of ‘thousand’ in the title, but, as Tony Brown of the Cleveland Plain Dealer discussed in his column a few weeks ago, the media has a critical role in shaping national language, and 1968′s “2001: A Space Odyssey” cemented that parlance more than 40 years ago.
So, then, what media harbingers will we have to shift our talking in a new direction? “2012,” for one, but also important are the individual deliverers of the media: newscasters, reporters and celebrities alike.
Pat Keirnan has a great column on Mediaite about that very issue, and he draws some of the same conclusions I have. He points to the hilarious but prescient Twentynot2000.com, which shows that people are (half) seriously trying to create a groundswell toward the new way of saying.
But the most important and obvious rationale in my opinion goes back to Tony Brown in Cleveland: “‘Two-thousand-and-ten’ is five syllables. ‘Twenty-ten’ is three.”
And if we learned anything in j-school, it was to be brief and to get to the point.
Welcome to 20-10.
