Footnote about decade pedantry
Jan. 9th, 2010 10:55 amA lot of people have objected to the decade meme on the grounds that the new decade should begin in 2011, not 2010. I like pedantry as much as the next person, but this feels a little gratuitous. Fair enough, the Third Millennium really began on January 1st 2001 (or some time in March 1997, if we're going to take things to extremes). But in my lexicon, a decade is simply a period of ten years. There's no good reason to restrict its meaning to the specific period from Jan 1st --x1 to December 31st --y0. But numbers ending in zero feel significant to our pattern recognizing brains, so the beginning of 2010 seems like a good time for a little reflection.
The other objection is to do with decades in the sociological sense. Does 2010 belong to the aughts or the teens? Well, for one thing it's too soon to tell, and for another, decade in that sense is a completely arbitrary division anyway. There's no specific date when we can definitely say, this is when the sixties began, it was a gradual transition some time between 1959 and 1961. Maybe the date of some significant cultural event, but those tend not to coincide with days when we switch over calendars. I feel, for fairly obvious reasons, that the world changed a lot more in 2001 than it did in 2000, but on a simple linguistic level, calling 2000 part of the "nineties" feels slightly off.
In conclusion, I say it's a decade, and I say fie on all the spurious objections.
The other objection is to do with decades in the sociological sense. Does 2010 belong to the aughts or the teens? Well, for one thing it's too soon to tell, and for another, decade in that sense is a completely arbitrary division anyway. There's no specific date when we can definitely say, this is when the sixties began, it was a gradual transition some time between 1959 and 1961. Maybe the date of some significant cultural event, but those tend not to coincide with days when we switch over calendars. I feel, for fairly obvious reasons, that the world changed a lot more in 2001 than it did in 2000, but on a simple linguistic level, calling 2000 part of the "nineties" feels slightly off.
In conclusion, I say it's a decade, and I say fie on all the spurious objections.
