2010, Zero Zero

Ten years ago, it seemed like you couldn't say the words "2000" or "millennium" without somebody rushing to tell you that the millennium didn't really start until 2001, because there was no year 0. Fine. I mean, what people were celebrating was the dawn of the two-thousands, and "the millennium" was just a shorthand for that, so those corrections always had a whiff of fussiness. But a word is a word, there was no year 0, and the correctors were absolutely correct.

Now I'm hearing -- not a lot, just here and there -- that we shouldn't be talking about "the end of the decade" this month. It's the logical extension of that "no year 0" argument: There have been 200 successive decades since the beginning of the Christian era, and No. 201 doesn't end until Dec. 31, 2010.

Well, the 201st decade A.D. does end on Dec. 31, 2010.

But this is still just wrong.

(1) First of all, it's wrong because if you followed this logically, you'd have to claim that 1990 wasn't part of the 1990s, but the 1980s.

(2) It's wrong because while you may say we're in the year of the Lord 2009, nobody says we're in the decade of the Lord 201. We just don't measure time that way. Again -- the "no year 0" argument only makes sense for ordinals, like "third millennium" or "21st century," where you really do have to account for what that first year was called. This leads into my final point.

(3) It's wrong because marking off time this way -- Aughts, Nineties, Eighties -- isn't math, it's cultural shorthand, and therefore subject to pop culture's rules. And pop culture is not on the side of fussy math. For example: When did the Sixties end? Altamont? Nixon's resignation? The fall of Saigon? Dec. 31, 1969? You don't have to look too hard to find someone making each of these points. But Dec. 31, 1970? Good luck.