Takes and trash talk from both ALL sides of the NHL's most obscure PATHETIC* rivalry

* Thanks, Kevin Lowe!

Saturday, July 15, 2006

One more grammar post, also irrelevant to hockey

Warning: this grammar post is lamer than my last one, but here goes.

It seems the common convention for 2006 is to pronounce it as “two thousand six”, as if it were a common number, like a dollar amount or a distance in miles. Probably, this comes from such influences as 2001: A Space Odyssey or Conan O’Brien’s In the Year 2000 sketch.

But really, declaring a year has a different speaking convention, at least it did back when I was a kid in the 1980s. Back then, we didn’t refer to our decade as the “one thousand nine hundred eighties”, but rather simplified things as the “nineteen eighties”. It was a much more efficient pattern for vocalizing a year, and it seemed to be universally recognized. But in the year 2000, for whatever reason, the rules slipped.

Follow the logic with me:


1806: “Eighteen oh six”
1906: “Nineteen oh six”
2006: “Two thousand six”
2106: “Twenty-one oh six”

Can you spot the outlier? It really should have been called “Twenty oh six”, and we are now living in the “twenty hundreds”. That is, if you want to remain proper with the convention that seemed admissible through the last days of 1999.

Now, the natural counterargument is “Well, if everyone has abandoned this rule, why not just go with the flow? Why cause a fuss?”

Well, 2010 is around the corner, and I think people might be favorable to saying “twenty ten” by then. Why not be brazen and be the first guy on your block to revert back to the old way?

Twenty-oh-six”: the way future historians will remember us.

5 comments:

Jeff J said...

What about "Twenty-aught-six?"

I always wanted to be like those old guys from the last millennium who told stories about the way it was back in 'aught-six.'

Earl Sleek said...

Whoa, do I know you, jeff j?

I swear one of my college buddies came back with the exact same reaction.

Aught-six it is!

Anonymous said...

Perhaps for a future grammatical post, you can touch on the lazy bastardization that is "irregardless."

Anonymous said...

There's a lot of talk around here about the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, and of course, that's pronounced "twenty-ten". I think it's pretty much a lock that we'll revert to the "twenty-(number)" format at that point.

Now, if you want a *real* challenge, see if you can get NHL coaches to say "He had a really good game" instead of "He had a real good game". Then I'll be impressed!
bms

Anonymous said...

As an English teacher - and a geek - I must point out that your post has nothing to do with grammar.