John's Blog

As the year twenty-eleven comes to an end, I wonder why so many keep calling it two thousand and eleven? No one ever called 1999 one thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine. OK, as The Year Two Thousand finally became real after a lifetime of representing the distant future, we were so enamored of the phrase two thousand that the next year no one but me wanted to say twenty oh one, possibly objecting to calling a zero oh. And indeed, twenty oh one and two thousand one and even two thousand and one take about the same amount of time to say. But starting in 2010, we could have saved a lot of time by saying twenty-ten instead of drawling out two thousand and ten. 2011 is a mouthful no matter how you pronounce it, but look what’s coming: Twenty-twelve! Perhaps the nineteen hundreds were not followed by the twenty hundreds, but that doesn’t mean we have to spend a hundred years saying two thousand and.