Depending on your view of things, by the time you read this column:
— We’ll be in the first year of a new decade known as the Tens, the Tweenies, the Twenteens or something worse,
— We’ll still be in the last year of the decade known, horribly, as the Noughties or the Naughties,
— It doesn’t matter, all of this is arbitrary and pointless. If you want to get technical about it, we are really in year 4 billion something (counting from the time of the formation of our giant rock, and its first journey around the Sun),
— Who cares what decade this is? The world is ending in 2012.
I lean towards the third view myself, but that’s mainly because of my journalistic dread for year-end summaries. Around this time each year, every newspaper, magazine and website starts recapping with a vengeance — and worse, pretending as if they’re doing something fresh, inventive and important, instead of admitting that the only justification for these tedious assembly-line exercises is that no one can be bothered to do any real work between Christmas and New Year.
And this year, of course, we have a more substantial “decade” theme to play around with. Or do we?
The dissent began with a curt Facebook status message by one of my smarter friends: “This decade ends next year, okay?” The comments section here made for more interesting reading than the nth list of “10 Cuddliest Reptiles of the Noughties”, so I decided to follow the debate. The central argument is that this decade ends on December 31, 2010 — the same way that the second millennium really ended on 31-12-2000 (not 31-12-1999, which is when most of the world went berserk).
But I’m not so sure the two situations should be compared. The millennium counting used a pre-specified date, January 1 in the year 1 AD, as the starting point (it’s another matter that no one knew it was Jan 1 in 1 AD at the time!) and so it was easy enough to figure out that 2,000 years ended in December 2000. But a decade is a less significant sliver of time and can reasonably refer to any 10-year period. On the blog Alpine Opinion (https://bsmedia.business-standard.comtinyurl.com- /yd9kk29), a commenter points out that the argument hinges on the difference between naming a group of years and counting years from the beginning. “Words like ‘fifties’ and ‘eighties’ refer to the third digit of the year (five and eight respectively). Likewise, “noughties” are simply the years 2000-2009, where the third digit is a zero.” Someone replies that the confusion arises because we chose to give names like “fifties” and “eighties” to decades. “Maybe the ‘eighties’ should be called ‘the 9th decade’ instead, because that’s what it really was.”
Confused? Don’t worry, you’re in good company. A long discussion on AVForums.com (http://tinyurl.com/yanh6tk) ends with the conversation-stopping comment, “So this means 1960 was part of the 1950s, right?”
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“It’s hard to believe that a whole decade has passed and we still don’t know what to call it,” says humorist Melvin Durai (http://tinyurl.com/ycqumvg), “That’s a problem for music companies which sold millions of CDs with titles such as Dance Hits of the ‘90s.” Naughties doesn’t work, he says, because there’s too much ambiguity. When you hear that Tiger Woods was voted the “athlete of the naughties”, you can no longer be sure what the reference is to.
Meanwhile, my favourite decade-end list so far is the list of “the Middle 10 Neither Best Nor Worst Movies of the decade” compiled by David Wain on his blog (http://tinyurl.com/-yc2csqp). “These films are outstanding in their banality,” exults a commenter. I recommend that any lists we make in 2010 be similar paeans to mediocrity.