Footnote about decade pedantry

[liv]

A 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 1^st 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 1^st --x1 to December 31^st --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.

Comments

[pseudomonas]

Maybe the decade should (in UK terms) start proper with the General Election? It seems more like a milestone than does a calendar change.

[redbird]

Also, I think a lot more people remember Dec. 31, 1999/Jan. 1, 2000 than remember the following New Year's Eve.

(That's aside from the fact that nobody uses "the Sixties" to refer to the period from 1 January 1961 through 31 December 1970; people who argue that, say, the Sixties didn't begin on the first day of 1960 are pointing to either shifts in attitude, or occasionally specific events: I have seen it claimed, from a U.S. viewpoint obviously, that the Sixties began on November 22, 1963.)

[nanaya]

Yeah, well said.

[ewx]

Having "the 199th decade" start in 1981 would be fair enough, but that's not how we name decades. I don't recall anyone in 1990 thinking that they were still experiencing "the 1980s" l-)

[liv]

Yeah, but General Elections don't happen every ten years, so this wouldn't work. I agree that it makes more historical sense to divide the last century into its alternating periods of government, than some arbitrary number of years, though.

[liv]

All good points, definitely. I think any definition of a decade as a sociological unit has to be from a specific country's viewpoint; the Sixties in Britain was obviously a completely different experience from the Sixties in, say, Vietnam.

[rysmiel]

Well, those of us who have read The Armageddon Rag know the exact date on which the Sixties ended.